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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought with it the vague threat of censorship, but by the spring of 2024 it had become an undeniable reality, marking a new period in relations between the country’s literary community and the state.
In response, the book industry has adopted what the late American sociologist James C. Scott called “the weapons of the weak”: in simple terms, practices that eschew direct and futile confrontation with the oppressor in favor of cleverly disguised but deliberately perceptible dissent.
Having enjoyed almost total freedom since the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev back in the 1980s, Russia’s literary community had no experience of censorship to fall back on when that freedom abruptly ended on February 24, 2022.
Initially, the eyes of the authorities were not on books, but on their authors’ social media posts. The first victim was Dmitry Glukhovsky, one of Russia’s most prominent and popular writers. After criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and posting Instagram stories about atrocities reportedly committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians, he was eventually sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for discrediting the Russian armed forces and declared a “foreign agent.”
That didn’t automatically lead to a ban on Glukhovsky’s books, however. They can still be found in Russian bookshops with an “18+” sticker (required for all books by “foreign agents”). Over the next two years, as one writer after another shared Glukhovsky’s fate, publishers had no formal grounds to protest: it wasn’t the books that were suffering, but the people who wrote them.
The one exception was Summer in a Pioneer’s Necktie by Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova, a bestseller about a romance between two teenage boys in a Soviet summer camp. In May 2022, it became the target of a witch hunt after the pro-Kremlin writer Zakhar Prilepin called for the publishing house to be burned down. When that only served to boost sales, the state intervened ruthlessly.
Although neither of the co-authors had publicly criticized the war, they were declared “foreign agents” and forced to flee Russia. Summer in a Pioneer’s Necktie was withdrawn from sale and became the catalyst for a ban on all “LGBT propaganda” in November 2022. Yet for almost the first eighteen months of the war, this was the only time a book was the primary target of censorship.
In the winter of 2023–2024, things took a sudden turn for the worse. Pranksters posing as Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff called several prominent Russian writers and released recordings of them expressing support for Ukraine. The writers were promptly declared “foreign agents” (and in the case of Boris Akunin, “extremist” and “terrorist”). This time, however, literature also paid the price. At the initiative of Russian “patriots,” festivals were shut down, authors’ books withdrawn from sale, and their appearances cancelled.
State media portray such “public activism” as the Russian version of Western cancel culture. This overlooks a crucial difference. Western cancel culture, whatever anyone thinks of it, is an instrument of society. In Russia, it is an instrument of state repression in which “patriotic” activists tip off the authorities to perceived outrages.
In April 2024, activists targeted books including Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, Vladimir Sorokin’s Legacy, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. On April 22, the publishing holding AST, which had released most of those books, announced their forced withdrawal from sale.
Intriguingly, it added that the measure was being taken upon the “recommendation” of a newly formed “expert council” of the Russian Book Union. The council’s formal status, methodology, and precise composition remain unknown, as does the nature of its “recommendations.” But its existence reflects the increasing systematization and ruthlessness of literary censorship in Russia since the beginning of the war. The spotlight is no longer only on the writers, but also on what they are writing.
In response to the ill-defined threat that emerged after February 24, 2022, members of the Russian literary community either panicked in paranoia or froze in denial. At one festival, organizers scrambled to hide the children’s book War by Portugal’s José Jorge Letria, while a presentation of Yanagihara’s To Paradise went ahead to a full house, despite the considerable risk of it being deemed “LGBT propaganda.”
This general disorientation was also reflected in alarmist reports of book bans in the press. They tended to be either fabricated or highly misleading: headlines such as “Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Books Removed From Russian Libraries” usually referred to some obscure library in the Volga region.
The idea of the reports was to fight censorship with publicity. But in the absence of clear instructions from the government, reports of book banning (true or not) only encouraged such practices elsewhere. Fearful of being left behind, every library and bookshop began to self-censor.
In the wake of this problem, a new public consensus was formed that the less censorship was talked about, the more slowly it would grow. Alarmist reports began to die down. Actual cases of book banning were even hushed up. With the realization that the enemy was guided by a book’s reputation rather than its content, it became bad form to publicly promote potentially censurable books.
The consensus of self-imposed silence lasted from early 2023 until the aforementioned events of April 2024 changed the game yet again. Angry at having to withdraw titles, AST published Roberto Carnero’s biography of the gay film director Pier Paolo Pasolini with passages relating to his sexuality not removed, but demonstratively blacked out. The publisher explained, not without irony, that the redactions made the book “interactive,” since readers could decide for themselves whether to research the missing sections, and an “artifact of the era.”
As such, AST was able to draw public attention to state censorship without technically defying it, effectively shouting “Look what they are doing to us!” over the government’s head. The story was picked up by most national and international media and became the catalyst for a new public consensus: one employing what James C. Scott calls “hidden transcripts.”
Scott primarily observed this practice in colonial countries. Unable to confront the oppressor directly, the oppressed could instead communicate in a way that didn’t formally disobey the authorities, but was read as protest by both the oppressor and the oppressed. The former saw the true attitude of the deceptively submissive locals and felt less confident. The latter felt united in the face of the aggressor. In refusing to sweep censorship under the carpet any longer, Russia’s literary community has now adopted this implicit form of resistance.
Once set in motion, the wheels of censorship gather momentum. A State Duma committee has already approved a ban on literature containing references to drugs. The law is not yet in force: lawmakers have yet to clarify whether it covers, say, classics like Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or Mikhail Bulgakov’s Morphine. But it will be implemented in due course.
In the fall, the State Duma will pass a law banning books by “foreign agents” from library collections. Those already there will either be destroyed or, more likely, placed in special storage, as in Soviet times.
These and other developments may well lead to a new public consensus. For now, however, the Kremlin’s censorship is meeting with cautious but clear resistance from Russia’s literary community. It’s not just professionals who are invited to take part, but readers too.
