Exiled Publishers Are Helping Russians Get Around the Kremlin’s Censorship

On a bright spring day in Berlin earlier this year, the Russian publisher Alexander Gavrilov ebulliently recalled the first time he read the banned poetry of Joseph Brodsky. It was the 1980s in the Soviet Union and Brodsky “just blew my mind,” Gavrilov said.

The USSR aggressively censored speech—controlling books through centralized state-run publishing houses—and much of what was permissible reeked of a stultifying sameness. “Grey and dusty literature, grey and dusty poetry, grey and dusty fashion,” he said. Reading a writer like Brodsky was a revelation after which “you can’t just live this boring Soviet life.”

Authorities convicted Brodsky—who was not formally affiliated with any state-sanctioned literary institutions, and whose poetry contained illicit spiritual themes—of “social parasitism,” sentencing him to five years hard labor near the Arctic Circle. (“Who gave you permission to be a poet?” the judge in his trial asked.) Though his work was banned, it attained cult status because exiles and activists in the United States and Europe published Brodsky’s poetry and smuggled it back into the USSR.

Brodsky’s legacy is what inspired Gavrilov to cofound his publishing house, Vidim Books, at a time when censorship in Russia is again reaching Soviet heights. Vidim, founded in 2023, releases books by authors whose work can no longer be published in Russia for political reasons, and is one of dozens of new publishing ventures that Russian exiles have established since 2022 to distribute contraband Russian books to readers both inside and outside of their home country. As the Kremlin targets literature, both fiction and nonfiction, at a scale unseen since the Soviet era, these publishers-in-exile have become crucial to safeguarding independent discourse in Russian-speaking society.

Multiple times a year, these publishers convene at book fairs across Europe, including this spring at the Berlin Bebelplatz fair. Named after the site where Nazis burned tens of thousands of “un-German” texts almost a century ago, the event aimed “to show that the Russian language today is not only the language of state propaganda and should not be appropriated by it,” as the organizers put it.

A German art school hosted the sprawling, multi-day convention. One publisher sold a title about Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, written by a Russian-speaking Ukrainian writer. Nearby, a publishing house founded by Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, sold her husband’s memoir, a book that Russia banned for inciting “hatred and enmity” toward authorities. Historians from the outlawed Russian human rights organization Memorial, which won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, gave talks, as did a group of queer activists, who said they were “extremists” in the eyes of the Russian government.

About 4,000 people attended the Berlin fair, organizers said, making it possibly the largest anti-Kremlin gathering of Russians anywhere in the world since 2022. This is not happenstance: Literature is central to Russian identity and has long played a role in the country’s politics.

For centuries, citizens and leaders alike have hailed writers as political and spiritual prophets in Russia. One of the country’s enduring myths is that it is home to the world’s most avid readers; state-backed pollsters project that around 70 percent of Russians read books almost every day.

The Soviet Union made universal literacy a strategic priority, rehabilitating and popularizing the 19th-century poet Alexander Pushkin as the father of Russian-language literature. In 1937, at the height of Joseph Stalin’s purges, authorities erected bronze Pushkin statues from Shanghai to Kyiv, and renamed a public square in the heart of Moscow “Pushkin Square.”

That square took on an entirely new resonance in December 1965, when dozens of people gathered there to protest the arrest and prosecution of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers on trial for their satires of Soviet life. Their trial marked the first time that Soviet writers were prosecuted solely for the content of their work; the gathering to support them was the first unsanctioned street protest the USSR had seen in almost 40 years.

Soviet authors Yuli Daniel (left) and Andrei Sinyavsky sit in the prisoners’ dock at the opening of their trial in Moscow on Feb. 10, 1966. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Pushkin Square continued to be one of Moscow’s most important sites of political protest during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thousands gathered there in February 2022 to oppose the invasion of Ukraine, which was one of the last large anti-government demonstrations in Russia. The Kremlin has since cracked down on free speech at a scale so astonishing that today, openly criticizing the government is all but impossible.

The Ukraine war has upended the near-total freedom that Russian book publishers enjoyed for the first two decades of President Vladimir Putin’s rule. Not long after the invasion began, Russia’s parliament passed laws outlawing broad categories of information: criticism of the army, texts that challenged “traditional values,” anything deemed “LGBT propaganda.”

The government escalated its efforts in 2024, forming an “expert center” to review published books that it suspects of non-compliance. The review process is intentionally opaque and likely to encourage self-censorship. The center has explicitly outlawed works by Russian and foreign authors alike, including those by Vladimir Sorokin, Hanya Yanagihara, Susan Sontag, and Stephen King. Police have raided bookstores and issued fines to those that display banned titles.

Last year, authorities embarked on what appears to be the first criminal prosecution over the content of books since the Soviet era. Prosecutors charged three publishing employees with participating in extremism for their role in disseminating 10 books that contained LGBT themes. The most prominent of the books in contention, Pioneer Summer, is a young-adult novel that broke no laws at the time of its publication in 2021. This month, the case concluded after the employees pleaded guilty, testified against each other, and publicly repented. They were each given four-year suspended sentences.

The logo of Eksmo, Russia’s largest publisher, sits atop the publishing house’s central office building in Moscow on April 21.Igor Ivanko/AFP via Getty Images

“Everyone is in shock,” a writer and book editor who lives in Russia said of the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety. “Everyone understands that that’s it, you are no longer protected in any way.”

The case has spread panic in the industry, and publishers have turned to AI to help them censor new books, the writer said, “because it’s no longer possible to manually check a text for compliance with all of the authorities’ demands.” Books that are censored this way often look like highly classified documents, with black bars redacting paragraphs of text. Some publishers view this as “a more honest choice” than deleting the words entirely.

Such censorship has given rise to a shadow market for banned books in Russia. Last month, the independent media outlet Verstka documented how prohibited titles are regularly sold through Avito, Russia’s answer to Craigslist, and the online retail platform Wildberries. Listings on these sites use oblique references in product descriptions to explain what they are selling. Banned books are mailed to buyers directly through the postal service.

Helping to supply this underground market of contraband books is the growing constellation of Russian-language publishers in exile—including those at the Berlin book fair—that is reviving and adapting the Soviet practice of tamizdat (to “publish abroad”) to evade censorship.

At the Berlin fair, attendees told Foreign Policy that they were “practicing their freedom” by engaging openly in public dissent, reading a book by a queer writer, or hearing a lecture from an independent historian. But they were also trying to retain their connection to their home country.

“There must be a way for these books to be read in Russia,” said Aleksandra Zerkalyova, an editor for the publishing arm of the investigative journalism outlet Meduza. She is one of thousands of Russians who moved to Berlin after the start of the Ukraine war. Zerkalyova sold hard copies of the banned book I Love Russia, a memoir by the journalist Elena Kostyuchenko.

That book was first published in English in 2023. Then, a few days later, Meduza released the original in Russian. It also published detailed instructions on how to safely purchase the book, for those abroad. Meduza determined that there was no safe way to buy it in Russia, where electronic transactions are traceable, so it decided to make the book free on its mobile app—a completely new method of disseminating tamizdat.

Since then, I Love Russia has been available to anyone in Russia with even temporary internet access (Meduza’s e-books download automatically for offline reading). Despite the Kremlin’s attempts this spring to cut off access to websites and popular messaging platforms like Telegram, Meduza’s app has functioned continuously on the Russian internet without a VPN for several years now. “It’s important for us that it could be read for free by anyone who reads in Russian anywhere,” Zerkalyova said.

A projection of the internet newspaper Meduza, promoting freedom of the press, can be seen on a wall in front of the Berlin TV Tower in Berlin on Jan. 16, 2025. Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images

Meduza makes the e-version of every book it publishes—around 30 so far—free and available to readers in Russia within a few months of its initial release. Zerkalyova said that they would ideally do this more quickly, but Meduza, like independent newsrooms around the world, used to rely on U.S.-funded grants that the Trump administration gutted last year. These cuts have thrown the organization into a financial crisis, and Meduza is hoping that book sales will help sustain not only its publishing operations, but possibly even its newsroom.

The U.S. historian Benjamin Nathans depicted the value of uncensored Russian literature in the 20th century in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, which charted the course of the Soviet dissident movement.

His book argues that Soviet totalitarianism began unraveling not in the 1980s, as is commonly understood, but in the 1950s, after Stalin died, when the state began relaxing its rules about which ideas society could be exposed to. By the 1960s, Soviet citizens were taking to the streets demanding the rights guaranteed to them by their constitution. The process kept unfolding in “zigs and zags over the course of the next three decades,” as Nathans put it in his book, and was often propelled by literature.

Soviet dissidents never intended to overthrow their government, Nathans told Foreign Policy. But literature produced by dissidents and exiles kept alive and revived ideas of human dignity and freedom that eventually reached the highest levels of the Kremlin. When the last of the Soviet leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced glasnost (transparency) as an official state policy, he was embracing a key tenet of the dissident movement.

The ideas contained in contraband books “are extremely precious,” Nathans said. “It’s hard to put a quantitative value on them. But if we lose those things, then we’re really sunk.”

This piece was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center.