From Glasnost to Silence: What Russia Tells Us About Books and Power

There is a photograph I keep returning to in my mind: a Soviet-era bookshop in Leningrad, 1988, the shelves suddenly full of Bulgakov and Pasternak after decades of absence. My father described something similar in Copenhagen that same year — the strange, vertiginous feeling when books that had been whispered about finally appeared in plain sight. Glasnost did that. It made the forbidden ordinary, and for a brief, irrational moment, people believed the forbidden would stay that way.

Svetlana Satchkova's new essay in Literary Hub traces the arc from that moment to the present: from the literary openings of Gorbachev's era to the systematic silencing that has unfolded under Putin, accelerating dramatically since 2022. It is not a comfortable essay to read. It is the kind of writing that makes you put down your coffee and sit with the weight of what is being described.

The mechanisms of control are, by now, depressingly familiar. Laws vague enough to mean anything. Denunciations that feel borrowed from the 1930s. The criminalization of the word "war" itself — a novel that calls the invasion of Ukraine by its proper name becomes, legally, a document of sedition. A young adult book, Summer in a Pioneer Tie, about two boys and an ordinary summer, was pulled from shelves after state condemnation. Max Falk's Shattered was printed with three percent of its text blacked out — a visual testament to the absurdity of what literature becomes when the state insists on editing it. Two playwrights, Berkovich and Petriychuk, were sentenced to six years in prison for a work the prosecution claimed promoted terrorism. The publisher Popcorn Books was forced to close by the end of last year.

What Satchkova names with precision is the most insidious mechanism of all: self-censorship. "The goal was to spread uncertainty and fear," she writes, "so that people would start censoring themselves. And it worked." This is the true cost of literary repression — not just the books that are banned or blackened, but the books that are never written because the writer has already calculated the risk before setting down the first word. The library of the unwritten is always larger than the one we can see.

I think of Knut Hamsun, who made the wrong political choices late in life and lived the rest of his years under the shadow of them. I think of Knausgård, whose six volumes of relentless self-exposure were greeted in Norway with the particular kind of anger that comes from recognition. Literature has always existed in tension with power. But there is a difference between a literature that disturbs and a literature that is silenced — the difference between discomfort and erasure.

What Satchkova's essay ultimately asks, without quite stating it, is whether we in the West are paying attention at the right moment. Repression is easier to resist when it is early and partial than when it is complete. The bookshop in Leningrad in 1988 was a kind of miracle precisely because it was temporary. What comes after silence is not, typically, another opening.