“Manuscripts don’t burn,” the protagonist of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita is told. This maxim is voiced by Satan, in reference to the Master’s destroyed opus. Having restored it, the devil punishes the man who tipped off the police about “illegal literature” kept in the Master’s flat, so as to move there himself. Bulgakov didn’t have to make this up. Surrounded by snitches, he managed to survive the Great Terror of the 1930s, as did his books. The Master and Margarita, on which he worked until his death in 1940, was first published uncensored in the USSR in 1973.
In the early 1990s, censorship was officially lifted in Russia. For a while, one could publish almost anything, but now literature has again become a target of oppression. Things have become particularly dire since 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine and criminalised “LGBT propaganda” among adults. In 2023 another bill was passed, outlawing the “international LGBT public movement” as extremist. These laws are now being deployed in Russia’s war on its book industry.
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