Thoughtcrime Raises Its Ugly Head in Vladimir Putin’s Russia

This past October, Elena Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia came out in English, weeks before anyone could read it in its original Russian. Featuring Kostyuchenko’s fearless reporting for Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper whose editor Dmitry Muratov was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, the book includes coverage of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It couldn’t have been published in Elena’s home country, since soon after the offensive began, Russia passed a law banning any coverage of the conflict that didn’t align with the government’s stance.

In spring 2022, Kostyuchenko was in Ukraine, reporting from the frontline, when Muratov’s sources informed him that the Russian soldiers deployed there had been ordered to kill her. She fled to Western Europe, where, several months later, she abruptly fell ill on a train to Berlin. She developed an excruciating headache and became disoriented. Soon, other symptoms appeared: nausea, stomachache, edema, palpitations, which lasted several months. German doctors, ruling out other possible diagnoses, concluded she had been poisoned. She still hasn’t fully recovered and now adheres to a strict security protocol, changing residences regularly. And there are reports of other Russian journalists who have likely been poisoned by the Russian state.

Despite the continuing possible threat to her life, Kostyuchenko’s book did appear in Russian at the end of November. Meduza, the largest independent Russian-language media outlet, which operates out of Latvia, has started a publishing venture to print books like Elena’s. The printed version is being distributed in bookstores outside Russia, and a digital version is now available for free through Meduza’s own app, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. “The Meduza app knows how to bypass any type of blocking. If you buy my book abroad, you make it available to readers inside Russia,” Kostyuchenko wrote on her Facebook page.

In this way, the practice of tamizdat, a Cold War-era phenomenon in which literature that couldn’t be printed inside the USSR was smuggled abroad and published there, has been revived.

Another wartime initiative of Putin’s regime was a further crackdown on the LGBTQ community, which had a direct effect on book publishing. In 2021, the young adult novel Summer in a Pioneer Tie by Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova was released by Popcorn Books, an imprint at an independent Russian publisher, and became a surprise hit. Its plot tells the story of two same-sex teenagers in a Soviet Young Pioneer summer camp discovering their sexuality and mutual attraction. The book sold more 200,000 copies in six months and caught the eye of State Duma deputies concerned with what they perceive as crumbling family values. This past November, the Russian Parliament passed a law banning “LGBT propaganda among adults,” making it a crime to endorse what Russia deems as “non-traditional sexual relations” across various mediums.

The passing of this legislation, which built on a 2013 law prohibiting “LGBT propaganda among minors,” almost immediately prompted self-censorship in book publishing. Some books were taken off the market, and others came out redacted. Certain publishers chose to black out passages that might be in violation of the law in newly printed volumes so that the censorship would be evident to the reader. In January 2023, a criminal case was filed against Popcorn Books, which specialized in queer literature, and, in February, its owner announced that he was looking to sell it. A few months later, Eksmo, Russia’s biggest publishing conglomerate, whichhas never shown interest in dissent, bought a 51-percent stake in the imprint, which most certainly means that no transgressive literature will be published by it. (My own Russian-language novel People and Birds was published by Eksmo in 2020.)

Where, then, does a queer Russian writer turn if they want to find an audience? Self-publishing platforms, presumably, fall under the new law, so tamizdat seems to be the only option. Springfield by Sergey Davydov, a debut novel telling the story of a young gay man in a provincial Russian city, was released by Freedom Letters, a publisher that appeared last April. Freedom has no base in any geographic location as its volunteer staff are scattered around the globe. The independent press was founded by Georgy Urushadze, who had been the head of Russia’s Big Book award and left the country after it invaded Ukraine. Freedom Letters has already published more than 50 book titles on paper and more than 55 digitally, most of them in Russian and Ukrainian, with a few in English. Their books can be ordered at over 40,000 outlets in several countries now, including Walmart and Barnes & Noble in the United States. “Our goal as a publishing house,” Urushadze says, “is to make sure that everyone who deserves to be heard is given a platform, especially if they were silenced back home.”

Samizdat is a practice that is perhaps less familiar to the Western reader. The word roughly translates as “self-publishing” and means manually copying and distributing banned or censored literature. This was done by dissidents in the Soviet Union, but the tradition, slightly modified for the internet times, has reemerged recently. Linor Goralik is an Israeli writer who spent more than a decade in Moscow and writes in Russian. When she finished her novel Bobo, she decided not to release it through her Russian publisher. The novel’s narrator, an elephant named Bobo, travels through Russia between March and October 2022 and comments on the massacre perpetrated by Putin’s army in Bucha and many other events that are part of his war effort. Goralik said on her website, “The people working at the publishing house, I love and fear for them, and their fate worries me much more than the fate of the novel.” So as not to endanger these people, she chose to make her novel available publicly. Anyone can download it from her website; the links have also been distributed through Telegram channels.

One of the most commercially successful Russian writers, Boris Akunin, is based in London and vocal against the war. In mid-December, it became known that Russian authorities added him to the list of terrorists and extremists. His books were immediately pulled from stores and libraries, and his publisher, AST, stopped printing them. This month, he announced that he would be publishing his novels and long form nonfiction works independently and distributing them through his website.

Both tamizdat and samizdat will likely grow in scope as Putin’s war against Ukraine continues and his regime becomes more oppressive. Many writers, me included, don’t want to be published in Russia, and are looking for less usual ways to get their work out in the world. On Nov. 30, Russia’s Supreme Court banned the “international LGBT movement” as “extremist.”

“The worse things get there, the more work we’ll have,” Georgy Urushadze says. In 2024, he is planning to put out twice as many titles as he did last year.

Svetlana Satchkova is a NYC-based writer and journalist. She is working on a novel set in present-day Russia.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.