In May 2025, ten people affiliated with Eksmo, Russia’s publishing behemoth, were detained in Moscow. Three of them, Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev, were charged with ‘organising activities of an extremist organisation’. Their crime was distributing LGBT-themed books (such as Pioneer Summer, a bestselling novel in which two teenagers exchange a few tentative kisses). Placed under house arrest, the accused faced up to twelve years in prison. Their hearings concluded this month; all three were given suspended four-year prison sentences.
The ‘publishers’ plot’ – an allusion to the late Stalinist antisemitic conspiracy theory known as the ‘doctors’ plot’ – has left Russia’s book industry in turmoil. The defendants all made deals with the investigators and pleaded guilty. Ivanov said he regretted his part in selling LGBT-themed books. ‘I’ve been fighting this all my life,’ he said, ‘since the Soviet days, when my Komsomol patrol hunted perverts.’
Felix Sandalov, the director of the StraightForward Foundation, a European nonprofit that supports the writing and distribution of books that can’t be published in Russia, used to work with the three men. ‘My colleagues found themselves in very difficult circumstances,’ he told me, ‘and not by their own choice.’
The list of banned topics was extended last year. It includes the ‘international LGBT public movement’, the ‘international Satanist movement’, drug propaganda, the promotion of childfree lifestyles, criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church, and parallels between Stalinism and Nazism. ‘Discrediting the armed forces’ isn’t limited to the Ukraine war: history books about the Red Army raping its way through Germany in 1945 are also prohibited.
Last year, Olivia Laing’s Russian publisher was fined 800,000 roubles for translating Everybody. Victoria Peretitskaya, a historian with links to the Russian publishing market, told me that the book’s ‘feminist perspective struck a chord with readers’, while its themes of ‘sexual freedom, the fight for human rights, the fight of minorities for their rights, domestic abuse … also resonated with society’. On the back cover of the Russian edition of Everybody there’s a photo of books being burned in Berlin in 1933. ‘When we chose it with the designer, in the spring of 2022,’ Peretitskaya said, ‘we couldn’t imagine the fate that awaited the book.’
While tamizdatflourishes abroad, there is also, according to Sandalov, significant demand for uncensored books in Russia. StraightForward has recently received nearly three hundred book proposals; subjects include propaganda in schools and deteriorating standards in research and education. Meanwhile in the UK, some publishers are now ready to rehabilitate Russophone writing, having put it on hold after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last month, I attended a workshop in London where someone suggested that translators from Russian should focus on ‘dissident authors’, an approach not that different from ticking boxes to appease censors.
I asked one of my contacts in Russia if the authorities were driven more by business or ideological interests. ‘They want to control everything,’ they replied, ‘like in the Soviet days.’ Eksmo recently used AI to check about twenty thousand books it had published over the past twenty years for forbidden content. Given a good prompt, my source said, Claude can do a decent job, though it tends to be overcautious, for instance, mistaking ‘coal’ for ‘cocaine’.
There’s no official censor to vet books before publication. ‘Publishers, libraries, book fairs … fulfil the censor’s functions themselves,’ Sandalov says. Sometimes they are helped by vigilante readers. Like everyone I spoke to, Peretitskaya stressed how hard the book industry has been hit, and yet, she said, ‘it’s still a living organism.’ She spoke of independent bookshops – some of them ‘places of hidden protest’ – and independent publishers. ‘If the oldest of them survive, you’ll be able to write a history of modern Russia based on them.’
In 2024, Individuum, an imprint owned by Eksmo, published Tabia Thirty-Two by Alexei Konakov, a novel set in Russia in 2081. Impoverished and isolated, the country has replaced literature with chess. Instead of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov, everyone reads Alexander Alekhine, Boris Spassky and Mikhail Botvinnik. The policy is bearing fruit. ‘Look how happy the people are,’ its mastermind says. ‘Thanks to the mass chess culture, our country has … growing labour productivity and general life satisfaction.’
Present-day Russia is still a long way from Konakov’s dystopia. The sanctions introduced more than four years ago remain a work in progress. Russian gas, which last year accounted for 12 per cent of EU gas imports, is supposed to be phased out by the end of 2027. Russian literature is easier to cancel. Books from Russia are ineligible for the EBRD Literature Prize, for instance. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has made no new investments in Russia since 2014 but maintains a portfolio of 788 projects there, worth €568 million.
The first time Garry Kasparov is mentioned in Tabia Thirty-Two, there’s a footnote: ‘Recognised as a foreign agent and included in the list of extremists and terrorists in the Russian Federation.’ I interviewed the former world chess champion in 2010, when he headed the United Civil Front, a movement he had formed to fight for democratic change in Russia. We talked, among other things, about state propaganda. ‘TV is a powerful weapon of mass destruction,’ Kasparov said. ‘But then there is a more vital appliance: the fridge.’
