JUANA SUMMERS, BYLINE: In Vladimir Putin's Russia, writing about the war in Ukraine, the church or gay life could land you in jail, so some publishers living in exile are trying to support writers and get around the censors, and they're taking a page from dissidents in the Soviet era, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
SUMMERS: In Vladimir Putin's Russia, writing about the war in Ukraine, the church or gay life could land you in jail, so some publishers living in exile are trying to support writers and get around the censors, and they're taking a page from dissidents in the Soviet era, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Some of the most influential books in the Soviet Union were samizdat, self-published. The government controlled the printing presses, so dissidents passed around typewritten copies of banned manuscripts. That's how many Soviets read Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master And Margarita" or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." Thirty-five-year-old Felix Sandalov remembers his older relatives talking about how Solzhenitsyn's writings gave them and the world a window into Soviet repression, and he wants to support writers in this generation who could do the same for modern-day Russia.
FELIX SANDALOV: Now we see a lot of catastrophes, a lot of war crimes going on, a lot of political persecutions that we could never imagine, like, 10 years ago even. But there were still some, but not to this extent. And there is an urge to document it.
KELEMEN: Sandalov is CEO of the StraightForward Foundation, which is helping Russian authors get their nonfiction books published abroad as long as they agree to put the Russian versions online for free. He says that way, Russians can share the PDFs through their social networks, something that was impossible in the Soviet era when sharing manuscripts was dangerous.
SANDALOV: You had to pass the physical book, which made it so dangerous because it could be found by the police. You had to explain how did it come to you and, like, it's a lot of traces. And with the electronical files, it's a good thing about them that they leave no trace if you do it, you know, smarter.
KELEMEN: He says his group's first book about Russian mercenaries and the Wagner Group has reached at least 30,000 people in a few weeks. One of his colleagues, Aleksandr Gorbachev, says there's another new book about a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, Memorial, which documented Stalin-era crimes and became a leading human rights group before it was shut down by Vladimir Putin's government. He says the author worked there.
ALEKSANDR GORBACHEV: He tries to understand what went wrong, why Memorial and other organizations weren't able to prevent the catastrophe that Russia is going through these days, the war, the authoritarianism that rules the country these days.
KELEMEN: There are other books in the works about Chechnya, the Russian Orthodox Church and its ties to Putin and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russia.
GORBACHEV: What's remarkable about it, that it is being written by a Russian journalist and a Ukrainian journalist.
KELEMEN: We speak over Zoom. Gorbachev - no relation to the former Soviet leader with that name - is living in Latvia. Sandalov is in Germany. Another of their colleagues, Alexey Dokuchaev, is based in Serbia. He was blacklisted in Russia for publishing a widely popular gay teenage romance novel. Putin's government has banned what it calls LGBT propaganda.
ALEXEY DOKUCHAEV: I am what they call a foreign agent in Russia, so I can go back, I just - I'm going to go to jail the second I get there. So until these guys are in power, I'm not there.
KELEMEN: Exile is not how the 43-year-old imagined his life. Dokuchaev says when he graduated from school, he and his friends started a youth political party called the First Free Generation.
DOKUCHAEV: Because we were the first generation who were actually Soviet-free. Yeah, little did we know.
KELEMEN: Now he and his colleagues can't imagine going back to Russia, at least while Vladimir Putin is president. They started the StraightForward Foundation this year to become pro bono literary agents for Russians writing about topics that Putin is censoring.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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