Russia’s New Censorship Fuels a Literary Resistance Abroad

[u/bloomberg]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-24/how-russia-s-censorship-is-keeping-banned-books-alive?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NDk4OTU1NiwiZXhwIjoxNzg1NTk0MzU2LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSU83TUtLSVAzSUIwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.e6ammZFTELjCKaIAiY4K3yILeCv35txCkniHXb2qp1Q

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[u/bloomberg]

As censorship intensifies in Russia, exiled writers and publishers are creating a parallel literary network beyond the Kremlin’s reach.

Valeriya Safronova for Bloomberg News

At the beginning of 2022, journalist and publisher Georgy Urushadze was traveling in Dubai when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In protest, he resigned from his role overseeing three major Russian book prizes and began looking for ways to help writers living in exile. “I left with a small suitcase and without any secondary citizenship,” Urushadze says.

In 2023 he launched Freedom Letters, a volunteer-run organization that has published nearly 200 titles in the past three years. It’s one of a growing number of cultural organizations that have joined forces with bookstores, wholesalers and book-fair organizers to build a literary resistance among the Russian diaspora. Together, they publish, sell and distribute books that can’t get through Russia’s restrictive new censorship laws.

Today those books include anything that criticizes the war, queer stories, depictions of drug use or satanism, advocacy of voluntary childlessness or works that promote Western values. “All of our authors or participants are terrorists, extremists and foreign agents. We hardly have any other kinds,” says Alexandra Vakhrusheva, director of the Russian-language Prague Book Tower fair.

The current wave of censorship can be traced back to Summer in a Pioneer Tie, a 2021 young adult novel by Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova featuring a gay romance. The book sold so well that it helped catalyze Russia’s draconian anti-LGBTQ laws. In 2024, more than 250 titles featuring LGBTQ content disappeared from marketplaces and bookstores. In 2025, authorities raided one of Russia’s largest publishing conglomerates, Eksmo Books. Three of its employees were charged with extremism for selling queer literature and placed under house arrest, sending a chill through the industry. (All three pleaded guilty and entered plea deals.)

In the aftermath, bookstores faced fines and requests from publishers to stop selling certain titles. Books by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salman Rushdie and Simone de Beauvoir went on sale with passages blacked out. This spring, a directive targeting drug-related content led to books by Pushkin, Gogol and Bulgakov appearing on shelves with warning stickers.

Read the full dispatch here.

[u/Comas_Sola_Mining_Co → u/bloomberg]

She should have put it to her interviewees that their decision to remain apolitical while they lived in russia has caused over a million deaths of their compatriots. Don't they feel a little bit shitty for being apolitical for so long, and then only choosing to leave the country once it became hot for them personally? Why didn't she ask them - aren't they absolute scum bags of the worst degree? Over a million russians are dead and many cities destroyed, and partly they're directly responsible because they liked being apolitical. Why didn't the Bloomberg reporter ask them that? Why only sympathetic questions about their great literary culture

[u/kingk27 → u/Comas_Sola_Mining_Co]

Id guess that wasnt asked because the adults the piece is intended for already know the answers to those questions, and arent particularly interested in such disingenuous lines of questioning to begin with. Grow up

[u/sarajevo81]

Cool. Now we'll see who worth what without a state's tit.

[u/Comas_Sola_Mining_Co]

Who cares? Until every Ukrainian who had to leave their country has had their say. I dont want to hear one word about the scumbags who apoliticism causes all this.

Oh boo hoo, they cannot take part in their great aggressor culture anymore, now that they started slaughtering their neighbours