![]() ![]() The second reason for Putin’s historically tolerant stance towards Russia’s writing community was that, when he came to power, he was trying to create a different kind of dictatorship. Mikhail Shishkin at a peace rally against the war in Ukraine on 4 March 2022. Putin didn’t care about the novels written in Russia, because literature was no longer where people got their news and ideas. Today, most Russians are primarily influenced by TV and the internet. ![]() This is for the simple reason that Putin’s Kremlin didn’t care because it didn’t need to. Putin and the thugs running the Kremlin weren’t nearly so closely attuned to contemporary Russian literary culture as the Soviets. The intention of this was to make the population believe the state was reality, and reality was the state. Stalin was an avid reader and very interested in literature, and the Soviets were deeply involved in the censorship of every kind of Russian culture. What was written and published inside the Soviet Union had genuine political power, as did Russian music and film. The first point is that literature was no longer the primary medium consumed in Russia. The reason for this softening under Putin was twofold. That is, they had a certain utility in the new Russia that Putin wanted to construct for the outside world. Far from seeking to exert control over the nation’s writers, Putin’s Kremlin understood their value in political terms. When he came to power in 1999, he learned from the mistakes of the Soviet Union and had a different relationship with Russia’s literary culture. Initially, under Putin, Russian authors were granted a great degree of freedom, even to oppose the state. But this has broadly not been the case in my lifetime – or at least, until the invasion of Ukraine. We imagine poets being shot in basements or worked to death in the snows of Siberia for a few lines of transgressive verse. In the west, we might think of Russian writers always facing the same kind of censorship they faced under the Soviet Union. ![]()
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