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From Glasnost to Silence: The Collapse of Literary Freedom in Russia

Svetlana Satchkova on the Logic of Authoritarianism

Via Melville House, By Svetlana Satchkova, March 18, 2026

In 1985, when a relatively young party functionary Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, a new era began. Gorbachev started reforms that eventually led to the dissolution of the state and introduced a politics of glasnost (“openness”). Suddenly, things that had long been off-limits could be talked about: Stalinist terror, political prisons, and other unspoken parts of history. Publishers began printing literature that had been banned or heavily cut by censors, like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

The end of the USSR in 1991 accelerated this expansion of public speech. The book market of a new country—Russia—was flooded with memoirs of repression and camp testimony, along with émigré and avant-garde writing, much of it never published before. For a brief moment, under pressure from progressive politicians and activist groups, even parts of the KGB archives were opened to the public.

It was an exhilarating time for many people: despite the hardships brought on by economic reforms, they could discuss and read almost anything they wanted—and they did, voraciously. A big part of that sense of liberation came from talking openly about sex, something that had been an almost complete taboo in Soviet times. As one woman famously said during a live TV link between Leningrad and Boston in 1986, “We don’t have sex here in the USSR.”

And yet by the late 1980s, at least in Moscow, sex education was making its way into high schools. Magazines and newspapers appeared that were devoted to the many forms human sexuality could take. I must’ve been sixteen or seventeen when I first learned that gay people existed. Soon, pop singers and TV personalities whose flamboyant style and mannerisms clearly marked them as queer began showing up on television. Like me, many people believed that a new democratic Russia was emerging, and that there was only one direction to go: forward. That was why, in 1997, after getting my bachelor’s in the U.S., I returned to Moscow.

But that mood began to change in 2000, when Vladimir Putin became president. He gradually dismantled democratic institutions, reversing much of what had been done before him. For free speech, this meant restricted access to archives, tighter state control of the media, and the promotion of a new patriotic narrative in which many aspects of World War II and Soviet state crimes were no longer open to public discussion. After the mass protests of 2011–2012, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest rigged elections, the crackdown intensified. A more aggressive system of control took shape, relying on website blocking, “extremism” prosecutions, and growing harassment of independent media. In 2013, the so-called “gay propaganda” law banned anything seen as promoting LGBTQ+ relationships to minors, part of a broader conservative turn.

The goal was to spread uncertainty and fear, so that people would start censoring themselves. And it worked.

I left Russia in 2016, seeing how it was speeding toward dictatorship, and wasn’t there to witness the wave of repression that followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But I kept a close eye on the news, as many people I knew were affected. On March 4, mere days after the military assault began, Russia introduced a series of censorship laws that radically narrowed what could be said in public. They made it a crime not only to oppose the war, but even to describe it in language that differed from the state’s official version.

The most ludicrous pieces of legislation were the so-called “fakes about the army” laws, which criminalized what the authorities defined as false information about the armed forces and were broad enough to be applied almost at will. You could be punished simply for calling the war a war: people were expected to refer to it as a “Special Military Operation” and to speak about it only in favorable terms. Objective reporting became impossible, and many independent media outlets shut down or left the country. The effects quickly reached the book industry. Publishers, bookstores, and libraries began avoiding anything that might attract attention. Topics involving Ukraine, the military, state violence, or contemporary politics could easily be interpreted as “discrediting” the armed forces. Authors labeled “foreign agents” for their anti-war or anti-government views, like the bestselling novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky, saw their books quietly disappear from shelves.

Another pivotal moment came in the summer of 2022. The year before, Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova had published a YA novel, Summer in a Pioneer Tie, about a budding romance between two boys in a Soviet Pioneer camp. After it became an unexpected and enormous bestseller, State Duma deputies condemned it as a threat to so-called family values, and it was soon pulled from bookstores. Then, in late 2022, a new “anti-gay propaganda” law was adopted, extending the ban on LGBTQ+ content to all ages and making positive portrayals of queer relationships in books, films, and media illegal.

The repercussions were far-reaching. Even before the law was passed, publishers began preemptively censoring manuscripts. Sometimes, following what they called a linguistic expertise, they cut fragments of text; in other cases, when they wanted to be transparent about censorship, they chose to black out sentences or even whole pages, so readers could see how much text was missing. One example of this practice appeared in Max Falk’s novel Shattered, published in October 2022. The book tells the story of a relationship between two gay men, and blackouts made up 3 percent of the entire text. Bookstores and publishers were also stumped about what to do with works in translation, including classics containing passages that could now be seen as problematic, such as Virginia Woolf. The laws were worded vaguely, making them open to interpretation.

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