In 2025, a significant share of major Russian-language books was published outside Russia. The article links this trend to tightening censorship and to the launch of new independent publishing projects in 2022 and 2023. In the author’s view, for writers openly at odds with the policies of the Russian authorities, the domestic literary infrastructure has ceased to be a reliable base.
The text lists several developments that, it argues, reflect that pressure: criminal prosecution of Individuum employees, the arrest of poet Glikery Ulunov, the closure of the Flags cultural project website, and further restrictions on publishing books by authors placed on the “foreign agents” and “terrorists-extremists” registers.
Key Books and Publishers
Among the most notable new releases are Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Fairy Tale and Dmitry Bykov’s novella The Arc, both published by Freedom Letters. The publisher’s list also includes experimental prose by Alexander Ilyanen and Ilya Danishevsky. Another highlighted title is Sasha Filipenko’s Elephant, issued by Vidim Books, which uses the image of elephants overrunning a city to explore conformity and the psychology of a totalitarian society.
ISIA Media published Viktor Yerofeyev’s New Barbarism and reissued Maksim Kantor’s Brother’s Watchman, a book that, according to the article, was later checked for extremism in Russia. Other prominent projects mentioned include BAbook, Meduza, Fresh Verlag, Ricochet Press, the Babel bookshop press, and One Book Publishing, founded in Lithuania to publish Alexei Navalny’s book Patriot.
Nonfiction and a New Context
The article also highlights major nonfiction works: Ksenia Luchenko’s With Good Intentions on the transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church, Sacred Wars of the Orthodox World by Andrei Kuraev, The Tsar in Person by Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin about Vladimir Putin, and Russian Cyberpunk by Andrei Zakharov. In the author’s assessment, exile publishing is no longer limited to samizdat abroad: outside Russia, a broader international Russian-language literature is taking shape, involving writers from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Israel, Germany, the United States, and other countries.