Banned Books in Russia Fuel Resistance Abroad

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it began a crackdown on free expression at home on a scale unseen since the Soviet era. The authorities sent libraries lists of objectionable literature, arrested publishers and threatened to fine bookstores for carrying titles by “undesirable” Russian writers, as well as works by acclaimed foreign authors like Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Stephen King and Haruki Murakami.

But the politicization of literature in Russia has inspired a uniquely robust resistance among a growing community of exiled writers and publishers. Drawing on some of the same tactics as the Soviet dissident movement, they have formed dozens of new publishing houses abroad. Their work has been supported by a growing constellation of independent bookstores in New York, Berlin, Tel Aviv, London, Vienna, Istanbul, Almaty, Riga and beyond, whose patrons include some of the roughly one million people who have left Russia since 2022.

Multiple times a year, these publishers, exiled writers and their readers convene by the thousands at bookfairs in Berlin and Prague for what may be the largest anti-Kremlin gatherings anywhere in the world. This community shows how vibrant intellectual debate can still occur in the face of hostile government repression.