Russia’s War On Books

You could find no clearer example of censorship than the February 20 decision of Megamarket, the online retail arm of Russia’s state-owned Sperbank, to cease selling books that might be actionable under a new law against vaguely defined LGBT “propaganda”.

As reported by journalist Alexander Plyushchev and others, Megamarket has taken the extraordinary step of pulling 250 titles that it fears might fall afoul of a ban on works deemed to promote non-heterosexual relationships. Vladimir Putin has been playing hardball against material with themes of this nature—real or perceived—and a law passed in December 2022 outlaws the promotion or sale of such works in print or on your screen, under the threat of steep fines.

Among the banned books are, reportedly, works by such popular authors as Haruki Murakami, Stephen King, Oscar Wilde, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Reading a list of some of the titles that Megamarket no longer wants to sell, you may rub your eyes in disbelief. Wilde’s beautifully written and resonant The Picture of Dorian Gray does not depict sex of any kind. It must be that the mere idea of selling a work by Wilde sends tremors through Sperbank executives. But Dostoyevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova, and Stephen King’s It, Doctor Sleep, and Different Seasons?

The inclusion of these books illustrates, as if we needed reminding, just how slippery the slope is when people get around to using the machinery of state coercion in an effort to protect the public from alleged extremism. Stephen King writes about killer clowns and telepathic boys growing up in the shadow of drunken fathers. Terminating the sale of It because one of its characters is a gay man set the bar for identifying propaganda a little low.

Racking my brain to try to think of anything in Different Seasons that might fall afoul of Moscow’s vindictive new law, I remembered a scene in the novella The Body where leeches attach themselves to the four boys as they make their way across a river, and one of the four, in panic, begs another to reach down and pluck some of the slugs off him. Better hide that work from your kids—they might start to think that removing leeches from each other’s bodies is kind of kinky.

Then there’s the close relationship that springs up between Andy Dufresne in ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’ and the narrator, “Red” Redding. The growing bond between them drives much of the plot, from the time Andy arrives in prison right up through the coda and fadeout where Red’s eloquence about how deeply he yearns to see his friend again on a beach in Mexico turns into a rumination on hope itself. If that is LGBT propaganda, then so are most works about deep friendships between men, in or out of prison.

Remember that in both the novella and the hugely popular Frank Darabont film, Andy’s antagonists include not just the brutal guards and the corrupt warden, but the bull queers who repeatedly rape him. It was this blunt depiction of the some of the more extreme forms of non-heterosexual lust that led the filmmakers to include a bit of dialogue where Red clarifies for Andy that he would be wrong to view his aggressors as homosexual: “You have to be human first.”

Russia Is Not Florida

To be clear, questions of age-appropriateness are valid, indeed necessary. “Propaganda” is vague to the point of absurdity. “Pornographic” is not, and Flamer, Gender Queer, and other of the titles than Ron DeSantis and other governors are trying to keep out of school libraries are pornographic in the sense that New York judge John Woolsey codified in his famous December 6, 1933, opinion on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Titillation is at least one of their raisons d’être, and parents of varying ideological stripes do not feel that their tiny kids are ready.

Denying parents any input on what their small children are ready for and when is wrong, and it would be cynical indeed to try to link what is happening now in Russia with the efforts of Ron DeSantis and other conservative governors in the United States to give moms and dads a voice on such issues.

For example, libraries in Moscow operate under an injunction forbidding them to feature any books that the regime deems to be the works of “foreign agents” or that take a stance against the war in Ukraine.

Those who would draw facile and politically tinged comparisons ignore the fact that Vladimir Putin is an oligarch of the kind that Russia has known throughout its history under one ideological guise or another, and his vindictiveness regarding what he has loosely classed as “LGBT propaganda” is part of a far broader hostility toward the free circulation of books and ideas. Just ask Alexei Navalny’s widow.