With the situation on the battlefield locked in a bloody stalemate, the Kremlin’s restless and oppressive eye continues to seek new targets — this time, its baleful gaze has settled on Russia’s writers.
Two immensely popular writers with a clear antiwar stand — Boris Akunin and Dmitry Bykov, both exiled — have now lost access to Russian bookstores and sales revenue.
The regime’s plan was not merely a clerical order to booksellers to remove stock. It was a sophisticated, multi-step special operation.
First, the two writers were approached by Vovan and Leksus, pranksters who often seek to make fools of pro-Ukrainian figures and anyone deemed anti-regime. Pretending to be representatives of the Ukrainian authorities, they succeeded in taping the authors expressing support for the Ukrainian armed forces.
A well-orchestrated hate campaign then hit Russian telegram channels and its blogosphere, before reaching the State Duma, where Deputy Andrei Gurulev, an army general, called Akunin an “enemy” who “must be destroyed.”
Why, the hate campaigners asked, are anti-patriotic writers able to make money in the country they are alleged to loathe?
The coup de grace came when the director of the biggest Russian publisher, AST, declared that sales of the writers’ books had been halted due to “public statements made by the writers that caused a widespread public outcry.”
The country’s largest bookshop chain and the most popular online store then fell into line and removed the books from sale. It’s very unlikely any other book chain in the country will continue to sell their writings for much longer.
Akunin and Bykov are old foes of the Kremlin and have been in its crosshairs since the Moscow protests of 2011-2012. They took to the stage at protest rallies in Moscow, and Bukov joined the Coordination Council of Opposition — the coordination body which Akunin had proposed to establish
Akunin left the country in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea. Bykov left in the fall of 2021 after he had been poisoned by the same FSB assassins who — equally unsuccessfully — attempted to murder Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza.
The Kremlin’s war against the wrong sort of books has been underway for some years. Tactics include insisting that those containing especially dangerous ideas (including works by the authors of this article) are only allowed to be sold in opaque coverings and stamped with the words “foreign agents.” This may be thought to have a depressing effect on sales.
What is remarkable in the new and destructive attack on Bykov and Akunin is the way the FSB has followed the playbook of the early Soviet secret police, the OGPU.
The Bolsheviks did not immediately ban the import of emigre publications. Long after the end of the Civil War, in the mid-1920s, it was possible to subscribe to emigrant journals in Soviet Russia and receive the latest issues directly from abroad. Even party organs subscribed.
Top Soviet papers, including Izvestia and Pravda, had special sections for reviews of emigrant books and articles. A polemic with émigré media was still possible. In February 1927, Deputy People’s Military Commissar Unshlikht, attacked an article on Soviet “militarization” by a Menshevik, Fedor Dan, in the émigré journal Socialistichesky Vestnik during a speech at the Bolshoi Theater.
The OGPU had suggested a ban on emigrant publication subscriptions the previous year, aiming to deny funding to the regime’s opponents. Chekists argued in a letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party that such publications had a very weak economic base and survived mainly because of subscriptions.
“According to the information at the disposal of the OGPU, a number of foreign White émigré publications, which have a small circulation abroad, maintain their existence mainly thanks to the paid distribution of their publications at exaggerated prices in the USSR.”
At the end of 1926, the Central Committee banned “independent subscription of White émigré periodicals” and Russian society lost access to uncensored Russian voices from abroad.
The OGPU’s successors are likewise eager to use their predecessor’s methods, but back in 1927, there was no such thing as the Internet.
Present-day Russian exiles run book publishing projects and rely on the Internet as a tool to reach Russian society behind the borders. Many can thus bypass the Kremlin’s information blockade, no doubt causing much irritation inside the Kremlin.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Nonresident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
