Russia Intensifies Censorship Crackdown on Publishers and Children's Books

Gate News message, April 27 — Russian authorities have intensified a sweeping censorship campaign, raiding the nation’s largest publishing house, Eksmo-AST, and targeting children’s literature. Security services have detained senior executives and begun a review of works by 78-year-old children’s author Grigoriy Oster, whose books use dark humor to encourage independent thinking.

Censorship measures include wrapping dissenting books in plastic wrap with warning labels, blacking out entire pages of text, and removing over 250 titles from online marketplaces, including works by Dostoevsky and Stephen King. A biography of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was released with approximately 20 percent of its content obscured by black ink. The crackdown has intensified since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with near-total bans on LGBT-related literature now in effect.

Exiled author Boris Akunin criticized the raids, noting that even the most compliant publishers, who attempted to appease the Kremlin through patriotic war publications and AI-assisted content scrubbing, have not been spared. Political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov warned that the regime “will not calm down until they have torn down everything - from monuments to the victims of political repressions, to children’s books on which several generations have grown up.”

Businesswoman Olga Uskova, who previously supported book bans, recently posted an apology on Telegram, expressing concern that unchecked censorship precedents create absurd and uncontrollable situations.