Vladimir Putin’s regime turns on book publishers

First, they came for the covers: in bookshops across Russia, the works of dissenting authors were sealed in plastic wrap with big warning labels.

Soon after, censors blackened entire pages. Police started launching raids on bookshops. Criminal cases were opened; publishers and editors were listed as “terrorists and extremists”.

Then, this week, security services in Moscow took their crackdown on the literary world a major step further, raiding one of the largest and most influential publishing houses in the country, and briefly detaining several of its senior executives.

The raids at the Eksmo-AST came despite attempts by its leadership to appease authorities last year, as repressive measures against the publishing industry intensified after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“People used to joke that we live in 1984,” one journalist for the independent Verstka outlet opined on Telegram last year, in reference to George Orwell’s novel about state surveillance. “It turns out that Fahrenheit 451 was right nearby,” he quipped. That dystopian classic, by Ray Bradbury, describes a world in which books are burnt and destroyed.

Eksmo chief executive Yevgeniy Kapiev and three others were released without charges on Thursday after three days in detention, with an obligation to make themselves available to any further investigation.

The move signals a new stage in the crackdown on dissent, given that Eksmo had co-operated with authorities, withdrawing authors, allowing books to be censored and publishing “Z” titles — patriotic books about Russia’s war.

“This is Eksmo, the quietest and most loyal, always ready to please the bosses,” Russian author Boris Akunin, who has been labelled a terrorist by the state and lives abroad, wrote for the Echo of Moscow outlet.

“They, poor things, used AI to scrub out any sedition from their books, blacked-out pages, and diligently printed (at a loss) all sorts of Z-type rubbish — in short, they tried their best,” Akunin wrote.

Yet none of these measures was enough for Vladimir Putin’s regime.

It sends a stark warning to others, Akunin said. “I guess the entire publishing industry will now quietly join the ranks of the regime’s secret enemies.”

It also carries deep echoes of the Soviet past, when thousands of books were banned.

Since February 2022, when Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine, the Kremlin introduced an intense wartime censorship regime. Repressive measures focused primarily on “foreign agent” authors such as Akunin and books by critics of the war. Many booksellers wrapped copies by such authors in covers that would obscure their titles.

A sweeping expansion of Russia’s so-called “LGBT propaganda” laws in December 2022 turned them into a near-total ban and vastly expanded the censors’ scope.

It was coupled with a decision by the country’s Supreme Court a year later that claimed there existed an “international LGBT movement”, and ruled it to be “extremist”.

One of the law’s first targets was a young adult book first published in 2021 called Pioneer Summer. Set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, it told the story of a romance between two young men who first met at a summer camp. It swiftly became a best-seller — the most popular fiction book in Russia in the first months of 2022.

But after a backlash led by socially conservative, pro-war cultural figures and members of the propaganda elite, citing the anti-LGBT laws, the book was banned and its authors fled the country.

Self-censorship swelled. Publishers including Eksmo pulled titles off shelves with same-sex relationship plot lines or scenes, such as Call Me By Your Name. Online marketplaces also pulled numerous books, with Sberbank-owned site Megamarket removing more than 250 titles — including books by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Stephen King.

In 2024, readers picking up a new translated biography of the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was gay, found that a fifth of the book had been censored with blocks of black ink.

The case against Pioneer Summer continued, too. In 2025, security services targeted its publisher, a small subsidiary of Eksmo called Popcorn Books. Several employees were charged with extremism for the dissemination of queer literature and some were placed under house arrest.

Eksmo closed Popcorn Books in January. But on Monday, as authorities conducted searches and detained senior executives at the main publishing house, state news agencies reported the actions were the latest development in the Popcorn Books case.

Other new measures have also been introduced. Books have begun to be marked with content advisory warnings for containing references to the use of drugs, for example, including a recent new edition of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

In a sign that the parameters for state censorship were expanding, Russia’s Investigative Committee this week announced it was launching a review of the works of the 78-year-old popular children’s author Grigoriy Oster.

Oster’s books and poems, such as Harmful Advice, are beloved in Russia since their publication in the 1980s for their often satirical, dark humour and their rebellious undertones — inspiring independent thought among children.

The Kommersant daily newspaper reported that the review was prompted by a complaint by lawmaker Maria Butina, who decried the books’ “destructive content” that could lead to “unlawful behaviour by children”.

Some observers described the constant stream of new repressive measures as the result of a general malaise.

“The rally around the flag is fizzling out, turning first into a frustrating, then tiring, and finally irritating treadmill. The economy . . . is steadily deteriorating,” political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov wrote in a column for Novaya Gazeta. “Hence the deepening absurdity in everyday life, accompanied by bans and repressions.”

Since the country’s rulers are not managing to improve quality of life and wellbeing in Russia, Kolesnikov wrote, “‘they’ will not calm down until they have torn down everything — from monuments to the victims of political repressions, to children’s books on which several generations have grown up.”

In an unusual and swiftly deleted post on Telegram, Olga Uskova, a businesswoman known for her denunciations against the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, wrote about her guilt at having started a campaign that led to more censorship in Russia.

“I regret that two years ago, I began the campaign against Sorokin’s ‘Nasledie’,” she wrote in a since-deleted Telegram post reprinted by investigative journalism outlet Agents.Media. “Yes, it is an absolutely vile little book . . . But it turns out, in our country it is unwise to set a precedent for any kind of ban. All sorts of people who love setting up roadblocks suddenly turn up and within seconds make the situation utterly absurd.”

“So — forgive me, my country! I didn’t mean to,” she wrote.