In Russia, bookstores offer a shrinking refuge as censorship tightens.
Bookstores on Edge as Kremlin Sets Sights on Policing Books
Restrictions on publishers and sellers have grown more severe. Volumes are being pulled from shelves or redacted like secret documents, but bookstores remain important sources of community.
Literature has always played an outsize, often uneasy role in Russian public life, alternately hailed and suppressed by those in power.
By Ivan Nechepurenko
The store, Podpisniye Izdaniya, also developed a distinct identity and cachet as a refuge of ideas in an increasingly tightly controlled Russia. Its tote bags emblazoned with witty slogans let its fans recognize one another around the world. The store was even featured in the 2023 “150 Bookstores You Need to Visit Before You Die.”
“The whole city is a fan of this place,” said Rinat Umyarov, 36, a local entrepreneur. “It is tangible proof that my generation not only lived in this city, but also created something.”
But that very success has become a problem since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Kremlin has repeatedly curtailed liberties in the arts and in speech that had been taken for granted. This year, especially, the government turned its sights on books...
Podpisniye Izdaniya was fined in May for selling three books, “Against Interpretation” and “On Women” by Susan Sontag, and “Everybody” by Olivia Laing. Although the titles were not banned, they contained “traces of propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” Russian investigators said.
Literature has always played an outsize, often uneasy role in Russian public life, alternately hailed and suppressed by those in power. Czar Nicholas I rehabilitated Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s pre-eminent poet, from internal exile, but told Pushkin that he would be the writer’s “personal censor.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/world/europe/russia-bookstores-refuge-censorship.html