The Grand Inquisitor
Vladimir Medinsky is a former head of the Russian Ministry of Culture, current negotiator in the peace talks with Ukraine, author of numerous school textbooks on Russian history, aide to Putin, newly appointed chair of the Russian Union of Writers, and likely the future chief censor who will impose the Kremlin’s ideology on the publishing industry. But who really is this man?
In our previous installments, we did not mention that Russia has a professional union for writers — for several reasons. Despite having local offices in every region, it has long been one of the most insignificant state-backed public organizations. For decades, the only real tasks of the Russian Union of Writers were to protect its valuable property (often in very desirable locations), find ways to profit from it for selected high-ranking members, and occasionally host anniversaries or funerals. Things, however, began to change in March 2025, when Vladimir Medinsky became the Union’s chair.
Within six months of Medinsky’s appointment, the Russian Union of Writers had
a) taken control of Khudozhestvennaya Literatura — one of the largest Soviet publishing houses, nearly extinct by the 2020s — to publish and promote “patriotic” literature;
b) expanded its budget sevenfold, to roughly 3.6 million euros for the following year;
c) amassed a substantial portfolio of real estate once belonging to the Soviet Writers’ Union; and
d) begun advancing the state agenda by every means available.
Leaving aside the legal aspect — the current Union being, at best, a dubious heir to its Soviet predecessor — it is worth recalling that in Soviet times, to which Medinsky so often appeals, the organization wielded enormous power over literature: it could literally permit or forbid the circulation of particular authors or themes. The new version of the Union seems designed to play a similar role.
Russia’s censorship apparatus already possesses a legislative framework and repressive tools; what it still lacks is an ideological core. Medinsky, with his fixation on “traditional values,” is clearly being sent to construct one. In the last couple years, international media were writing about Medinsky because of his role in negotiating a peace deal, or, more accurately, in disrupting it. Former Ukrainian foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin told journalists that Medinsky, as part of the Russian negotiating team, exerted “psychological pressure” on the Ukrainians and acted as an “aggressive negotiator,” insisting that “Ukraine does not exist.” According to Klimkin, “His appointment was a conscious choice by Putin, as Medinsky plays the role of an ideologue. It means that Putin approaches negotiations from an ideological standpoint”.
Like many other Russian officials known for their aggressive anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, Vladimir Medinsky was born in 1970 in Ukraine, then part of the USSR. He moved with his parents to Moscow in the 1980s. As a teenager, he dreamed of joining the military or, ideally, the secret services, but was rejected due to poor eyesight. He joined all the standard Soviet youth organizations — Pioneers and Komsomol — even though, by the time of Perestroika, such memberships were no longer mandatory. Ideological belonging, however, seemed to matter to him.
In the 1990s, Medinsky turned to the advertising business. He would later recall that his agency specialized in “fake news” and “black PR” — an admission that, unintentionally, outlines the professional DNA of Russia’s contemporary propaganda class. In 1998, he entered public service as an advisor to the director of the Federal Tax Police, and a year later became head of a department at the Ministry of Taxes and Duties. Since then, he has demonstrated the archetypal career path of a Putin-era official: executive, talkative, reliably loyal, and inherently corrupt: a closed circle of trusted affiliates has been moving through the ranks together with Medinsky ever since, despite not having any relevant qualifications.
What distinguished Medinsky from many of his peers was his obsession with Russian history. “From the very beginning, he impressed me with an extremely original — at the time, almost marginal — concept of Russian history. It was based on the idea that ‘England has been scheming against Russia for a thousand years,’ and that we are actually ‘pure and innocent,’ while everything bad said about us is just a myth. I’m simplifying, but this worldview in his head was crystal clear. For a liberal like me, it was shocking,” recalled one acquaintance of Medinsky from that period, as quoted by Proekt Media. This line of thinking led Medinsky to become first a writer fighting against “western myths about Russia”, then a head of Russian Historical Society, mostly concerned with honoring the glorious and victories of Russian army in the past, and — to a big surprise of everyone — the head of the Ministry of Culture.
Under Medinsky, the Ministry of Culture became a fully functional ideological instrument. Immediately after he took office in 2012, the ministry prepared a list of ‘priority topics’ for Russian cinema: “Russia as a multinational country,” “Russia’s military glory,” and “The people’s war — dramatic pages of the Great Patriotic War.”
Medinsky’s time in the Ministry was not without scandal. The most notorious was the attack on the Gogol Center and its artistic director, Kirill Serebrennikov, who was accused of embezzling state funds during the production of a play and put under house arrest. This widely reported case sent a clear message to everyone working in Russian theater, the vast majority of whom depend on state funding: any one of you could be sent to jail if you cross the line we draw.
Another controversy erupted when Medinsky claimed in an interview that the Russian people possessed “one extra chromosome.” The statement, published in October 2012 by Russian Life, a Russian-language newspaper in San Francisco, was intended as patriotic bravado but sounded closer to genetic exceptionalism. “After all the disasters that befell Russia in the twentieth century — from World War I to Perestroika — the fact that Russia still exists and continues to develop shows that our people have one extra chromosome,” the minister said.
Then came time to have doubts not only in his understanding of biology, but in his profile field, history, as well. In 2017, Medinsky’s doctoral dissertation, Problems of Objectivity in the Coverage of Russian History of the 15th–17th Centuries, became the subject of controversy. Several historians deemed the work unscientific, identified numerous factual errors, and demanded that the author be stripped of his academic degree. The expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK) agreed, concluding that the author lacked “basic professional skills as a historian.”
Medinsky has also been linked, directly or indirectly, to several corruption scandals. One high-profile case involved the embezzlement of around 900 million rubles (around 9 mln eur) allocated for the reconstruction of one of the Hermitage buildings. The main defendant, former Deputy Minister of Culture, was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. Many observers, however, continue to question how such embezzlement — especially involving the Hermitage — could have occurred without Medinsky’s knowledge. The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) reported that Vladimir Medinsky and his family own 57 properties in Moscow and the surrounding region, valued at nearly 6 billion rubles (around 60 mln eur).
In recent years, Medinsky has drawn attention not as a cultural manager but as a propagandist and ideologue. In 2023, Russian high school students began studying new history textbooks co-authored by him and MGIMO rector Anatoly Torkunov. The final chapter, titled “The Special Military Operation,” includes sections like “The Revival of Nazism,” “Ukrainian Neo-Nazism,” “The Return of Crimea,” “The Fate of Donbas,” and “Russia — the Country of Heroes.”
Since Medinsky assumed leadership of the Russian Union of Writers in March 2025, experts in the publishing industry refer to Medinsky as the de facto curator of literary censorship in Russia. According to sources familiar with him, he was among the co-authors of Putin’s 2022 presidential decree on ‘traditional spiritual and moral values’ — a foundational document of the regime’s new conservative course, with its enemies, sacred traditions, and prohibitions. This decree now serves as a censorship tool: the Ministry of Culture requires galleries, theaters, and film distributors to work only with content that reflects ‘traditional values.’
When once asked by a journalist whether censorship exists in Russia, Medinsky replied without hesitation: “Absolutely not.” Papercuts expects that — with the newly empowered Russian Union of Writers — there will be a huge effort to build an “official literature” like it was in the Soviets. History, so much beloved by Medinsky, however, offers its own warning: when state support disappears, the “official canon” tends to collapse overnight.
Bonus: an excerpt in English from the book Illuminations of the Lightning by Mikhail Bashkirov, supported by StraightForward, which tells the story of the Yakutian shaman that went with the magic war against Putin, gained the support of the Siberian people and then was involuntarily put to psychiatric hospital. Full book in Russian will be released before the end of the year.
One more bonus: a podcast in English about book censorship in Russia and how people resist it — by writer and journalist Howard Amos and political analyst and researcher Nina Berezner. It’s a great overview of the situation in the Russian book industry, and we highly recommend giving it a listen.