On a bright spring day in Berlin earlier this year, the Russian publisher Alexander Gavrilov ebulliently recalled the first time he read the banned poetry of Joseph Brodsky. It was the 1980s in the Soviet Union and Brodsky “just blew my mind,” Gavrilov said.
The USSR aggressively censored speech—controlling books through centralized state-run publishing houses—and much of what was permissible reeked of a stultifying sameness. “Grey and dusty literature, grey and dusty poetry, grey and dusty fashion,” he said. Reading a writer like Brodsky was a revelation after which “you can’t just live this boring Soviet life.”
Authorities convicted Brodsky—who was not formally affiliated with any state-sanctioned literary institutions, and whose poetry contained illicit spiritual themes—of “social parasitism,” sentencing him to five years hard labor near the Arctic Circle. (“Who gave you permission to be a poet?” the judge in his trial asked.) Though his work was banned, it attained cult status because exiles and activists in the United States and Europe published Brodsky’s poetry and smuggled it back into the USSR.
Brodsky’s legacy is what inspired Gavrilov to cofound his publishing house, Vidim Books, at a time when censorship in Russia is again reaching Soviet heights. Vidim, founded in 2023, releases books by authors whose work can no longer be published in Russia for political reasons, and is one of dozens of new publishing ventures that Russian exiles have established since 2022 to distribute contraband Russian books to readers both inside and outside of their home country. As the Kremlin targets literature, both fiction and nonfiction, at a scale unseen since the Soviet era, these publishers-in-exile have become crucial to safeguarding independent discourse in Russian-speaking society.
