Literature is now extremism
This is the new age of censorship — and the Kremlin sets the score.
In May 2025 police in Moscow raided several apartments and offices linked to Eksmo, the country’s largest publishing conglomerate, which controls more than a half of the entire bookmarket. Ten people were taken in for interrogation. Seven were released.
Three remain under house arrest.
One is Artyom, 25, a distribution manager of two imprints that Eksmo bought out a couple of years ago. Another is Pavel, an avid rock lover in his sixties, already retired from his role as a head distribution of those imprints. The third is Dima, who went a full-way from IT-manager to a CEO of a small publishing house and had relocated to Belgrade after the start of Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine. He happened to be visiting his elderly mother in Moscow when the raids began. Police forced entry into her apartment, pinned her to the ground, assaulted her and took away her son.
These three people are our colleagues. We worked together, releasing and successfully selling four hundred books on different difficult topics. Today, all three remain under house arrest, awaiting trial. They are charged under Article 282.2 of the Russian Criminal Code: organising activities of an extremist organisation. Their lawyers have stated plainly: acquittal is unlikely. The maximum sentence is twelve years.
But this is not just about Russia. Russia is just a flagship of the gruesome process of new censorship. Books everywhere are getting thinner, translators and writers struggle to make a dime, and there are also powers that be. Dictatorial regimes hunt down freedom of speech. The independent media were the first to fall — now literature, especially nonfiction books, is in the crosshairs. The court cases against publishers are not legal proceedings. They are instruments of fear. This is censorship. This is a real crime.
“Papercuts” documents such crimes, shares encouraging stories of independent publishers — past and present, — helps you navigate the Russian book market riddled with conformism and contradictions, and ultimately gives voice to the oppressed.
“Papercuts” is run by the StraightForward project.We have years of publishing experience in and outside the country, dozens of literary and journalistic awards, a wide network of colleagues — and a deep passion for iconoclastic literature.
We grew up in a country where everything once seemed possible. We got used to the freedoms that followed the fall of the USSR — and we don’t want to give them back.
StraightForward bypasses censorship and creates honest, relevant, and profound books — books by which our time will be remembered.
We resist by a thousand papercuts delivered to the regime: small, sometimes almost invisible — but always painful.There’s something in the pages of a book that cuts deep and stays there. This Substack exists to preserve that feeling — and to share books the Kremlin doesn’t want you to read.
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Today, it's the autocracy in Russia that decides what to read and how to think. Tomorrow, it could be your case.
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