By Murad Rakhimov | 2026-06-04

Russian libraries are pulling books from their shelves -- not because the books are bad, but because of who paid for them decades ago.

Across Russia, public libraries are purging thousands of titles acquired before the country introduced official state censorship, targeting books funded by organizations now deemed "undesirable," including leading international research centers and universities. The scale is staggering. According to Russian business daily Vedomosti, complying with laws on foreign agents and undesirable organizations could result in the removal of more than half of all Russian library holdings.

Half the shelves, gone

Oleg Novikov, president of the Eksmo-AST publishing group, said the risk extends beyond books authored by designated foreign agents. The restrictions also apply to titles in which such individuals or organizations played any role -- as commentators, annotators, or even page designers. Books published with support from now-banned groups are similarly targeted, along with any academic theses and papers that cite those sources.

"This, of course, creates significant obstacles for educational and cultural outreach," Novikov said.

In Yekaterinburg, officials plan to scrap roughly 30% of all books acquired during the 1990s. City library director Irina Cheremisinova announced the measure at a city Duma meeting, citing shifting legislation. A large share of the targeted books, she noted, were purchased with grants from the George Soros Foundation, which began operating in Russia during the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika reforms, funding students, researchers, internet centers and textbook publishing. Russia's Prosecutor General's Office banned the foundation as an "undesirable" organization in 2015, accusing it of seeking to undermine the country's constitutional order. The foundation ceased all operations inside the country following the ban.

A purge decades in the making

The library purges intensified sharply after Feb. 24, 2022. Unofficial blacklists began circulating across Russia, sweeping up writers and commentators who opposed the war in Ukraine or had been designated as foreign agents — among them Dmitry Bykov, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Mikhail Zygar, Ekaterina Shulman, Leonid Parfyonov, Boris Akunin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The passage of a law banning "LGBT propaganda" triggered another overhaul, ensnaring international and domestic authors alike, including Haruki Murakami, Stephen Fry, and Michael Cunningham. By 2024, further legislative changes added any literature mentioning narcotics to the list.

Social media reaction has been sharp. Telegram comment threads filled with readers asking whether they could take books home before they disappeared — or whether they would be burned. Others put it plainly: "There are four thousand prisoners of conscience in this country, based on official charges alone. Publishing houses, writers, and bookstores are all facing prosecution just for carrying books that bureaucrats don't like."

Dmitry Dubrovsky, a professor at Charles University in Prague, told Kontur the situation goes beyond ordinary censorship.

"Because censorship is when books are seized and banned. But here, we are talking about actual destruction -- an auto-da-fé," he said, using the medieval term for the public burning of heretics and their books. "In the long run, all of this will have very grim consequences for science and higher education. This is a long-term process, where the results do not appear in a week or a month. But this is, so to speak, a 'contribution' to a serious future degradation."

Knowledge replaced by ideology

Alisher Ilkhamov, director of the Central Asia Due Diligence center in London, told Kontur that Soros-funded libraries had served a vital purpose during a period of historic public awakening -- when demand for previously restricted knowledge was surging and the collapsing Soviet economy left the state unable to fund new publishing.

"What the Putin regime is doing now by purging libraries of literature that Soros helped acquire is a return to the Soviet era, when ideology and propaganda replaced knowledge in the social sciences and humanities," Ilkhamov said. Without that knowledge base, he argued, Russia will be unable to develop a viable strategy for its own advancement, guided by ideological dictates rather than evidence.

Galym Ageleuov, an expert from Kazakhstan, told Kontur the book removals will cut off Russian citizens from foundational knowledge about civil society, human rights, and international standards.

"Free, independent literature on various subjects shapes a free individual," he said. Replacing it with ideologically approved titles will produce a society unwilling to ask hard questions and a country that the rest of the world comes to regard as an intellectual backwater.

Compounding the damage: no official banned-books list exists. Most libraries will turn to self-censorship, putting countless works of modern Western literature at risk. The result, Ageleuov warned, is a society entirely dependent on the authorities and a state that will "inevitably begin to degrade in the sociopolitical and, subsequently, the economic spheres."