A historian and translator of Russian and Swedish literature, and a literary critic for Le Monde, Elena Balzamo closely follows the Russian literary scene. She notes that even though there is no official censorship, the authorities blithely ban hundreds of books—including major classics—demanding that they be removed from libraries and bookstores, and persecute publishing houses. Not to mention contemporary writers labeled “foreign agents,” the ban targets Plato and Boccaccio, Virginia Woolf and Dostoevsky, Stephen King and Haruki Murakami, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde. And since the definition of “traditional values” is vague, the fantasies of informants and zealous officials run wild.
One of the chapters in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is entitled “Give Us Back the Death Penalty!” “Give us back censorship!” is a demand being heard ever more loudly in the country that, just a few decades ago, was the land of glasnost and is now the “land of traditional values.” What has happened?
Compared with the current situation, the publishing landscape of the Soviet era seems almost idyllic. One would write a book, knowing full well which topics to avoid, which names and words should not be uttered, and so on—internal censorship did its job. The text would then reach the editor at the publishing house, who would “clean it up” in turn, striking out passages and words that “wouldn’t be allowed through.” The final step was state censorship, the Glavlit—if you passed that, you had nothing left to worry about: your book had just cleared the last hurdle before publication; it ran (almost) no risk of being pulled from sale and defaced1.
(For films, it was more complicated: even if the screenplay had cleared all levels of censorship, the director could turn an approved script into an “unacceptable” film, which explains why so many films were shelved and, worse still, why the original film reel was destroyed. )
In 1991, everything changed. Censorship was officially abolished, freedom of expression was total—there was euphoria. Moreover, the publishing landscape changed from top to bottom: instead of a small number of state-run publishers, with a relatively limited number of titles (hence the abundance of complete works: 30 volumes of Dostoevsky, 24 of Balzac, 33 of Dickens, etc.), we now have a jungle of private publishers, large and small, and a number of titles growing at an exponential rate.
At first, this wasn’t a problem: people were happy to catch up on missed works (Orwell, Huxley, Nabokov, Zamyatin, etc.), to introduce new voices (Sorokin, Pelevin), and to publish books “for every taste.” But as the Putin regime has grown harsher, problems have begun to multiply.
Children’s literature was the first to suffer. In the name of “child protection,” books addressing erotic themes were removed from libraries, harkening back to the prudishness of the Soviet era. The scandal surrounding A Summer in a Red Headscarf (2021) by Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malissova is emblematic of this. The book was pulled from sale, its authors labeled “foreign agents,” Popcorn Books, the publishing house, accused of extremism, two employees arrested, as well as, more recently, the editor of Eksmo, the parent company of Popcorn Books, and several of her colleagues (they were later released as witnesses).
In addition to “inappropriate” content, the translator’s background is sometimes a factor: thus, the publishing house specializing in children’s literature, Albus Corvus, had to “temporarily” withdraw from sale four titles by Sven Nordqvist, a famous Swedish author and winner of the Astrid Lindgren Award (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for children’s literature), whom one can in no way accuse of violating public decency. The reason? The translator, Alexandra Polivanova, a human rights activist now in exile, was labeled a “foreign agent.” To top it all off: these translations had been published over twenty years ago and had been circulating freely ever since, to the delight of young readers and their parents.
Next came the turn of the latter—the adult readers. It would be tedious to list every step of the crackdown, which notably intensified after Vladimir Medinsky’s appointment as Minister of Culture in 2012. The man, who cheerfully rewrites history textbooks, keeps a close watch to ensure that literature, too, falls in line.
Directives from above are compounded by initiatives from below. People go out of their way to avoid being accused of negligence, and books are the victims. Just a few years ago, a joke was circulating about an imaginary conversation in a library: “Dear colleague, would you be so kind as to move Orwell’s 1984 from the fantasy section to the current events section? ” – it’s no longer funny, because there is no longer any Orwell on the shelves of public libraries.
The list of banned authors and works is now so long—about 250 entries—that it is impossible to reproduce it here. Here is a modest sample: Plato, Boccaccio, Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Stefan Zweig, but also contemporary Russian authors: Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, Dmitry Bykov. Added to the concern for upholding moral purity is the witch hunt—pardon me, the hunt for “foreign agents”—which sometimes yields curious trophies: for instance, in a bookstore in Saint Petersburg, a collection of poems by Bulat Okudzhava, the Russian Georges Brassens, was labeled “foreign agent” twenty years after the poet’s death.
The Russian Sherlock Holmeses (hey, this one’s a notorious drug addict—come on, let’s get rid of him!) are therefore active on three fronts: libraries, bookstores, and publishing houses. For the former, it’s fairly simple: librarians receive the lists, and it’s up to them to do the work (adding a few titles of their own). But, as Lenin said, “Trust is good; control is better!” and raids on libraries are on the rise.
For example, on April 4, 2026, an administrative notice was sent to the Central Universal Scientific Library (“the Nekrasovka”) in Moscow, a venerable institution housing over a million books in some hundred languages. The alleged offense was “propaganda of non-traditional sexuality.” The fine for this offense can be as high as one million rubles. The details of the accusation are currently unknown.
These raids can sometimes take the form of full-scale sweeps, as in November 2013, when agents from the prosecutor’s office inspected libraries in Stavropol, particularly those in schools, and reported finding 215 violations of the law on child protection: works imbued with mysticism, eroticism, and horror. Books by Esenin and Nabokov were among them.
Raids are also increasing at bookstores. For instance, on April 10, 2025, a search took place at an independent bookstore in Saint Petersburg. Several books were confiscated in a search for “LGBT propaganda.” The bookseller was handed a list of 48 titles now banned from sale.
The situation becomes even more complicated when it comes to publishing houses. Denunciations, raids, and convictions are on the rise, and with them uncertainty—no one knows which way to turn anymore. One of the best-known examples, which sparked a wave of comments on social media, concerns Roberto Carnero’s biography of Pasolini (Dying for Ideas), in which, to avoid destroying the already printed book—which had just drawn the authorities’ ire—the publisher blacked out about 20% of the text, specifically the passages referring to the filmmaker’s sexual orientation. To make the best of a bad situation, he described this expurgated version as an “artifact of the era” and a “performance attribute” in “our current context.” Se non è vero è ben trovato.
We had a good laugh at this story, but the prevailing mood is gloomy. For unlike in the Soviet era, when the ground was well-marked and when you took a risk, you knew exactly what you were exposing yourself to, these days you never know in advance what awaits you. A book that is perfectly harmless today may turn out to be subversive tomorrow and land you in court the day after. Authors practise self-censorship, and so do publishers. According to some sources, no longer trusting their own judgment, publishing houses hire censors who search for “sensitive” passages and remove those they consider “potentially problematic.”
And what about the readers? In Russia, a country once famous for its citizens’ love of reading, their numbers are dwindling—just as they are everywhere else—and, according to polls, among those who remain, the number of supporters of reintroducing state-level censorship continues to grow.So, Back in the U.S.S.R.? Probably.
Elena Balzamo is a specialist in Scandinavian and Russian literatures, an essayist, translator, and literary critic. Born in Moscow in 1956, she received her university education in Soviet Russia before settling permanently in Paris in 1981. A historian of Scandinavian languages and literatures, she wrote her doctoral thesis on Scandinavian folktales.