Russia Is Going Back to the U.S.S.R.

According to a story in the Moscow Times, drawing on reporting from the business journal Vedomosti, the regime of Vladimir Putin does not need to go to the trouble of banning books that it fears might give people the wrong ideas. Others are all too happy to pursue repression on Putin’s behalf and make Russia every bit as hostile to the free flow of ideas and the open discussion of contentious topics as many U.S. campuses in the spring of 2024. Now that’s saying something.

The Russian Book Union, which includes a large number of the country’s most prominent libraries and publishers, has helped Putin with the launch of a committee that makes recommendations about works while, in theory, leaving the ultimate decision about whether to continue to make them available in the hands of the downstream distributors.

The move comes hot on the heels of the decision of online retailer Megamarket to cease offering works that might violate Putin’s ban on such vaguely defined LGBT propaganda.

You could find no more perfect illustration of how a benevolent-sounding advisory role encourages and abets censorship and, in the end, grows hard to distinguish from the thing itself. Vladimir Putin is in the midst of trying to squelch Ukrainian independence and does not need any trouble on the domestic front.

Hence it is best that publishers and libraries refrain from selling or featuring material that encourages people to think about how their lives could be better and what regime change, or even modest social reform, might look like in practice.

As per the Moscow Times, the Book Union’s move has already had far-reaching consequences. The publisher AST has announced its decision to stop selling titles by two American authors, James Baldwin and Michael Cunningham, as well as the Russian dissident writer Vladimir Sorokin. In the union’s view, the books of these and other literary figures fall afoul of the Russian state’s bans on so-called LGBT propaganda.

Placing content-based restrictions on literature is a dirty move reminiscent of the darkest days of Russia’s tortured history, whether or not you believe the books in question to feature such agitprop. The question is academic, because while some of the writings here may contain sympathetic portrayals of non-heterosexual relationships, that is incidental in the scheme of things. Without doubt, the real problem for Putin and his oligarchy is their espousal of a seditious view of a dreary and repressive central authority that stifles the rights of people everywhere to self-expression and self-determination and their ability to take a public stance against policies they abhor.

To take the example of Sorokin, his message and sensibility are a problem for a controlling regime whether the year happens to be 1981 or 2024. His short fiction, recently reissued in an authoritative New York Review Books paperback edition, Red Pyramid: Selected Stories, depicts the squalor and miseries of life under an overbearing central authority. Sorokin is like early Martin Scorsese on steroids.

In Sorokin’s vision, functionaries and bureaucrats engage in sexual liaisons and trysts in the course of trying to carry out their duties just to take their minds off how miserable they are. In the volume’s memorable opening piece, an official visiting a factory that has missed its output quotas initiates a private meeting with one of the facility’s executives and literally craps on a production plan to register his view of the merits of the entire undertaking. It’s a grotesque story, lacking in all subtlety, and that is the point. When people do not believe in their mission, or the purpose that in theory unifies and ennobles the society they serve, the first casualty is interpersonal relations. Things get toxic fast.

The Book Union’s decision to warn against tolerating such works does not happen in a void, of course. No doubt Putin and all who curry favor with his despotic regime are keenly aware of the antecedents of iconoclastic fiction in today’s Russia.

If you are a literate Muscovite, your intellectual curiosity is only likely to grow as you engage with the words and ideas of people who have challenged tyranny in the recent past, and you are certain to begin to think about analogues.

Read a little Sorokin, or Baldwin, or Oscar Wilde, or Stephen King, and these critics of a time and place in history may make you think of a book like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in which an exile in Siberia considers it a good day when he has gotten a few minuscule scraps of food and, at least for the time being, escaped torture and murder at the hands of the guardians of socialist virtue and the glorious new society. Ivan Denisovich had better content himself with a discrete role in his prison camp, much like a student on a U.S. campus who thinks that anti-Israel protests have crossed the line into full-blown antisemitism but is too afraid of ostracism, and the disfavor of those will grade his work, to speak out.

What are you going to want to read next? Maybe The Gulag Archipelago. Not the ideal material for a pliant populace expected to fall in line with the dictates of its supreme leader and refrain from questioning diktats and decisions on either the domestic or the foreign front.