Censorship of writers
Just as in Bulgakov's time under Stalin, all means are used to silence writers who disagree with the regime in the Russian Federation under Putin. As in Bulgakov's time under Stalin, informers are used and «prominent people» are called in to publicly condemn the authors.
On February 8, 2024, about thirty Russian writers were on the notorious list of «foreign agents». A survey of five Moscow stores of the chain Dom Kniga or Book House confirmed that the following authors are no longer allowed to be sold: Boris Akunin, Natalya Baranova, Dmitry Bykov, Viktor Vachshtain, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Mikhail Zygar, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Andrei Makarevich, Aleksandr Nevzorov, Leonid Parfenov, Evgeny Ponasenkov, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Ekaterina Shulman.
The examples are numerous, but I have selected three of the most popular writers, but I wanted to sow the mechanims. Their treatment can be applied to the others without many changes.
Boris Akunin
Writer Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili (°1956), better known by his pen name Boris Akunin, is one of the most popular contemporary Russian authors.
Boris Akunin
Akunin has often criticised Vladimir Putin's domestic and foreign policies, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014. On March 5, 2022, he co-signed an open letter from writers who strongly condemned the invasion of Ukraine.
In December 2023, Boris Akunin was called by people pretending to be representatives of the Ukrainian government, and the recordings of that conversation, in which Akunin expressed his support for Ukraine, were made public. Many Russian publishers immediately stopped publishing and distributing his works. Russian politician Andrei Viktorovich Gurulyov (°1967) called Akunin an «enemy who must be destroyed». Gurulyov is a member of the Duma for Putin’s United Russia party. In 2014-2015, he was commander of the 12th Reserve Commando, which was deployed in Ukraine with the mission «to expand the territory of the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic». In April 2023, he suggested that the Putin regime should reintroduce the Stalinist terror of the 1930s against the «enemies of the people» in Russia.
Andrei Viktorovich Gurulyov
Akunin was subsequently added to the list of «terrorists and extremists» by Росфинмониторинг [Rosfinmonitoring], the federal service that collects information on financial transactions in order to «combate domestic and international money laundering»..
In January 2024, the Russian Ministry of Justice designated Akunin as a «foreign agent». Later that month, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs placed his name on a wanted list for alleged criminal activity. On February 6, 2024, a Moscow court ordered the arrest in absentia of Akunin, who now lives in London. He is accused of «justifying terrorism and spreading fake news about the Russian military».
For the former, he faces up to seven years in prison, for the latter up to 10 years. Terrorism is apparently less serious than criticizing the military.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Lyudmila Yevgenievna Ulitskaya (b. 1943) is my favorite contemporary Russian author. In 2001, she was the first woman to win the Russian Booker Prize, and her works have been translated into at least 33 languages. Ulitskaya has been very vocal about life in Russia. In an interview with The Guardian in 2011, she said: «Our country is in a terrible state. Schools and hospitals are underfunded, our pensioners are on the brink of poverty, and the state of our army is shocking. Our soldiers are malnourished and live in unsanitary conditions».
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
In 2008, she corresponded with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was then imprisoned in a Soviet-era labor camp in eastern Siberia. At first, Ulitskaya didn't expect them to have much in common, but over time she learned to respect him and began to defend him. Your webmaster has translated this correspondence into Dutch. You can read it by clicking on the arrw below.
In March 2014, she and several other scholars and cultural figures publicly stated that she disagreed with the policies of the Russian authorities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In February 2022, she spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and later that month she emigrated to Germany because she shuddered at the «Stalinisation" of her country.
On March 5, 2022, she co-signed an open letter from writers who strongly condemned the invasion of Ukraine. After the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she was, like other Russian writers who opposed the war with Ukraine, persecuted and «cancelled»: her books may no longer be published and sold.
In early February 2024, the AST publishing house, which has been publishing Ulitskaya's works since 2011, issued a statement saying that payments to the writer were being suspended because she had requested that her copyright proceeds be transferred to Ukraine.
Vladimr Sorokin
Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (°1955) is also a well-known and successful contemporary author. In March 1992, he began to gain fame when the magazine Искусство кино [Iskusstvo kino] or The art of cinema published his novel The Queue. In 1985, the story was published in book form in France by the dissident émigré Andrey Donatovich Sinyavsky (1925-1997). The Queue does not follow a traditional narrative style. Instead, it is told in dialogue, to give the reader the feeling of being part of a queue - a common phenomenon in Russia. The book is filled with nothing but voices: snippets of conversation, rumours, jokes, howls of humor, roll calls and sexy moans. And when everyone in the queue falls silent, a few blank pages are inserted.
Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin
Sorokin has the ability to handle different styles. He uses the language of the nineteenth-century classics as easily as the language of the Soviet press. In his work, realistic descriptions alternate with passionate lyrical or totally absurd, surreal passages. Sentimentality can suddenly change into cruelty and reality is often completely turned upside down. His books are therefore full of unexpected, shocking and also bizarre twists, which often lead to descriptions of murder and violence.
The plots of Sorokin's works have repeatedly caused controversy among the public. In the early 2000s, the pro-Kremlin movement Идущие вместе [Idushchiye vmeste] or Walking together burned his books in a staged toilet bowl installed on the Theatre quare and also filed lawsuits demanding that certain passages in the writer's works would be labeled as pornographic.
On March 5, 2022, he co-signed an open letter from writers who strongly condemned the invasion of Ukraine. He stated that he lived in Berlin and had decided not to return to Russia.
International appeal from writers on the war Today we, writers, appeal to all who speak Russian. To people of all nationalities. To those for whom Russian is their native language. To those for whom it is a second language. Or the third. Today, the Russian language is used by the Russian state to incite hatred and justify the shameful war with Ukraine. In the Russian language, the official media spread all the lies surrounding this aggression as a smokescreen. Russian citizens have been fed lies for many years. Independent sources of information have been virtually wiped out. Many critics of the regime have been silenced. The state propaganda machine is running at full speed. But today it is crucial to convey to the citizens of Russia the full truth about the Russian attack on Ukraine. About the suffering and losses of the Ukrainian people. About the threat to the entire European continent, and possibly to all of humanity in the event of a nuclear threat. You speak Russian. It means a lot. Please use all possible means of communication. Phone. Messenger. Email… Talk to people you know. To people you don’t know. If Vladimir Putin is blind and deaf, perhaps Russians will hear those who speak the same language as they do. This criminal war must be stopped. Svetlana Alekshevich, Nobel laureate for literature, Vladimir Sorokin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Dmitri Glokhovsky, Victor Shenderovich, Maria Stepanova, Sergei Lebedev, Lisa Aleksandrova-Zorina, Sasha Filipenko, Alisa Ganjeva, Viktor Martinovich, Maksim Osipov, Aleksander Genis, Lev Rubinstein, Aleksandr Ilyevsky, Mikhail Shishkin, Boris Akunin
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