Russia’s New Censorship Fuels a Literary Resistance Abroad

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.

“Even kids’ books are being marked for mentioning magical potions. This could be interpreted as drugs, and so they get a sticker,” says Kira Yarmysh, former spokesperson for opposition leader Alexei Navalny and now editor-in-chief of One Book Publishing, which was founded by the dissident’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya. Independent media outlet Agentstvo estimates about 600 books have been taken out of circulation since 2023, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

In response, Russians outside the country have expanded their scope, says Lianna Akopova, bookshop manager at Pushkin House in London, a cultural exchange organization. “Alongside books about the war, contemporary diaspora literature also explores migration, identity, culture, feminism, the queer experience, decolonization, the everyday realities of exile,” she says.

Some are describing these works as a new version of tamizdat — a term meaning “published over there” used during the Cold War to describe manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union for publication in Europe or the US. Today tamizdat is a core offering in the Russian-language bookshops that have sprung up across Europe, Turkey, Israel and the US, where an estimated 1 million to 2 million Russians have resettled since Putin came to power in 1999.

Yasha Klots, an associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hunter College in New York and the founder of Tamizdat Project, a nonprofit and small press, says he knows of 617 standalone editions published by Russian and Belarusian authors outside their home countries since 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Some are reissues of classics that publishers abroad believe will resonate in the current political climate.

The current wave of emigres is considered the fifth to leave Russia since the beginning of the 20th century. Most are college-educated and support Ukraine; they left for political rather than economic reasons, according to an analysis by CASE, a European think tank.

Anya Morlan-Stysis opened Kvartira Books, a nonprofit bookshop, library and event space in Brooklyn, in 2024. “We’re seeing much more of a wave of immigration that will spend their last money on books,” she says. “The previous waves were looking for their kids to assimilate. When we came here, my parents embraced me speaking English. I wasn’t speaking Russian to anyone.” Now, she says, parents who visit her store, which sells a mix of children’s and adult literature in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, are determined to preserve their ties to home.

To feed that desire, Morlan-Stysis offers all sorts of events in Russian, including drag queen storytime; scientific lectures on topics such as black holes, dopamine and conspiracy theories; poetry readings; book clubs; and fundraisers for political prisoners and for Ukraine. “We wanted to be a third space,” Morlan-Stysis says. “You can come into my store and not pay any money. We have cozy chairs, a play space for kids to crawl around. We offer coffee, tea and water free of charge.”

Akopova, the manager of Pushkin House in London, says that immigrant-run bookshops like hers function more like cultural centers, with events designed to spark dialogue and keep people connected to what’s happening back home. For the store owners themselves, the diaspora’s literary network also serves as an important support system.

“You have a community with publishers, authors, other bookstores,” says Dmitriy Sidorov, an owner of Babel Books Vienna. “In many ways, running this kind of business gives you the feeling that you’re not alone and you’re needed.”

Read more: Julia Ioffe on Why Putinism Won’t Die With Putin

Like their Soviet forebears, today’s tamizdat publications still make their way into Russia. About half of the books Freedom Letters sells to customers in Russia are physical editions. On its website, buyers can order books through an automated Telegram bot and pay with cryptocurrency. Alternatively, they can buy a sticker pack in rubles and receive a book as a gift. “We play a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, and for now we’re winning,” Urushadze says.

On a video call, Prague Book Tower fair director Vakhrusheva holds up two copies of The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one published the usual way, and one published as tamizdat. The tamizdat version, she says, “is lighter, thinner by about one-third.” It was published by Russian emigres in Paris, “specifically to be brought across the border in suitcases.”

E-books have been easier to smuggle into Russia. “With the development of technology, we’re no longer dependent on the size of books,” Vakhrusheva says.

Several websites and apps specialize in allowing Russians to download books by independent publishers to their phones or other devices. Meduza, a well-known independent media outlet covering Russia, has an app where readers can download more than two dozen books for offline reading, including I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country, by Elena Kostyuchenko, and War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, by Mikhail Zygar.

Another app, Pereplet, charges readers outside Russia €14.99 a month for access to its library. Inside Russia, access is free. On its website, Pereplet says its books are stored in an encrypted format, and its FAQ recommends deleting the app before crossing borders or visiting a government agency.

StraightForward Foundation, a nonprofit founded by exiled Russian publishers, helps Russian-speaking authors write and publish books in translation abroad. Though it doesn’t charge authors a fee, it retains the noncommercial rights to their e-books, meaning it can distribute them for free in Russia. The foundation’s PDFs are also uploaded to piracy websites and Telegram, where more than 46,000 people viewed one title, Death Is Our Business: The Complete History of the Wagner Group, by Ilya Barabanov and Denis Korotkov.

“It’s scary to order books via mail,” says Felix Sandalov, StraightForward’s chief executive officer. “People need to be able to get books without danger and without footprints.”

Though tamizdat books are politically significant, selling them is not profitable. Even with logistical challenges and import fees, books published in Russia are the biggest moneymakers for Russian-language bookshops abroad. They’re cheaper to print inside Russia and have large print runs, with more than 140 million people still living in the country.

Yulia Grishenko opened Murawei, an online bookstore and publisher based in Berlin, in 2017 with 400 titles. Today it offers 75,000. Selling books from a country with censorship laws presents unique challenges. Grishenko says customers periodically order books that are banned a week or two later. “Sometimes we’ve had to give people money back,” she says.

Still, Grishenko says only about 2.5% of Murawei’s books are tamizdat, and they account for about 10% of revenue. Sidorov says about 20% of the books in his shop are published outside Russia. He adds that, if it “becomes impossible to import books from Russia,” Babel Books Vienna will have “an unworkable business model.”

Nevertheless, for tamizdat publishers, profit is not the point. “A book is an act of protest, an act of support, an artifact of wartime. This is how I resist the growing terror in this world,” says Urushadze, who was designated a foreign agent by the Russian government in 2024. “If I wanted to make money on books, I would publish cookbooks. People are always buying cookbooks.”