‘It’s mostly whining’ How pro-war writers and A.I.-enhanced censors conquered Russia’s literature industry
In May 2025, police raided the private homes and offices of current and former employees of Eksmo-AST, Russia’s largest publishing group. About a dozen people (the exact number remains unclear) were arrested in connection with so-called “LGBTQ extremism.” Prosecutors later brought formal charges against Dmitry Protopopov, Artyom Vakhlyaev, and Pavel Ivanov, who had worked at the publishing houses Individuum and Popcorn Books. Eksmo-AST acquired these publishers in the summer of 2023 — houses that produce contemporary literature, including titles covering topics that present-day Russia deems “dangerous.” The arrests marked a turning point in the literature industry, changing the calculus of capitalizing on progressive assets in an increasingly conservative legal environment. Meduza correspondent Kristina Safonova reports on how Russia’s book publishers have navigated the growing influence of pro-war writers and A.I.-enhanced censors.
Where have all the ‘patriots’ gone?
On pro-government Telegram channels, the news of the police raids and arrests of employees at Eksmo publishing house sparked not only satisfaction but also debate — about who had played the bigger role in launching the criminal case, and about where to draw the line between a donos (a denunciation filed with the authorities) and a “civic stance in defense of the law.” The writer Zakhar Prilepin, who has worked with the Eksmo-AST holding for many years, did not take part in these discussions. Nor did he comment on the arrests of employees at Popcorn Books. That publisher released Leto v Pionerskom Galstuke (Pioneer Summer), the best-selling coming-of-age novel by Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova that outraged many, including Prilepin, because of its portrayal of LGBTQ themes within the context of the Soviet Union.
“Does Zakhar Prilepin systematically go after [other authors]? I don’t think so — he’s someone floating above it all,” a source in Russia’s book market told Meduza. “And while he clearly had a hand in setting this whole thing in motion, I don’t think he’s there, in the room with federal investigators, breaking publishers’ fingers.”
Prilepin has repeatedly complained that cultural figures avoid addressing the “special military operation” in their work, and that the handful who do write about the war’s daily realities receive no state support and remain marginalized. For years, Prilepin belonged to Russia’s anti-Kremlin opposition, serving as a member of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party. After it was banned, he became one of the leaders of its successor group, Drugaya Rossiya (The Other Russia), which never achieved formal registration as a political party. Alongside Alexey Navalny, he attempted to create the national-democratic movement Narod (The People) and called for Vladimir Putin’s resignation during Russia’s abortive “snow revolution” of 2011–2012.
In 2018, Limonov expelled Prilepin from the Drugaya Rossiya movement for joining the central headquarters of the pro-Putin All-Russian Popular Front, established in 2011 ahead of parliamentary elections. “If Zakhar Prilepin has no principles, we cannot afford to be without principles,” Limonov explained.
Since 2014, Prilepin has been involved in the war in eastern Ukraine, fighting for Russian proxies in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. He has recounted this experience in several novels and essay collections — among them Vsyo, Chto Dolzhno Razreshit’sya. Khronika Pochti Beskonechnoy Voyny: 2014–2022 (All That Must Be Resolved: Chronicle of an Almost Endless War, 2014–2022) and Nekotorye Ne Popadut v Ad: Roman-Fantasmagoria (Some Will Not Enter Hell: A Phantasmagorical Novel).
Prilepin began as a war correspondent, then worked as an adviser to DNR leader Alexander Zakharchenko, and later served as deputy commander for personnel in a special forces battalion of the self-declared republic’s army (he has claimed that he personally commanded a unit that “killed people in large numbers”). In 2022, according to his spokespeople, Prilepin joined the Russian National Guard’s “Oplot” battalion and was soon promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In early May 2023, his car was blown up on a highway near Nizhny Novgorod. The driver, Alexander Shubin, was killed, but Prilepin survived. A man from Ukraine’s Donetsk region was convicted of carrying out the attack and sentenced to life imprisonment.
“Right now, the core of Z-literature is coalescing around Prilepin,” literary historian Mikhail Edelstein told Meduza. In early 2022, Prilepin, along with writer Alexey Kolobrodov and poet Oleg Demidov (both from Russia’s “patriotic” milieu), launched their own publishing venture. They called it KPD, using the initials of their surnames. Books released under this label — including the complete poems of Eduard Limonov, the “war stories of front-line writer” Andrey Platonov, as well as works by those “who unequivocally supported their country during the special military operation” — have come out from a variety of publishers. Some of the project’s authors, including Demidov and Kolobrodov, belong to the “Union of February 24” society, which emerged in early 2024 to promote, according to its members, patriotic cultural policies.
Zakhar Prilepin and the Union share many of the same ideas: in their view, the state funds “projects that conspicuously avoid being political” or even those “engaged in open sabotage or cultural subversion,” while doors have been “shut” to true patriots for supporting the invasion of Ukraine.
Union writers set out to change this situation — at least for themselves. In the summer of 2024, Prilepin’s Tradition Cultural Center and the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, run by Vladimir Putin’s niece, Deputy Defense Minister Anna Tsivileva, began lobbying Russia’s Culture Ministry. The group sought the introduction into libraries and schools of a list of books of “contemporary front-line prose,” The Insider reported, citing spokespeople for the political party Just Russia For Truth, where Prilepin serves as co-chair. According to journalists, the list included 15 works from the KPD series. A year later, a party insider told Meduza that Prilepin would be “shouting it from the rooftops” if the project had succeeded. “If he’s silent,” the source continued, “that most likely means there’s been no success.”
Still, Prilepin and his circle have achieved some results that no one can deny: in December 2024, the KPD project became a standalone division within AST. “They just popped up out of nowhere one day,” a source close to the holding told Meduza. “But that order came straight from the top.”
On the publishing subdivision’s VKontakte page, the brand manager is listed as 19-year-old Kira Prilepina, one of the writer’s four children. (A source familiar with the holding’s operations confirmed this to Meduza.) “She’s just an ordinary girl, but you don’t really want to talk openly with her about books. You never know what she might report back at home,” the source said, adding that Prilepin has agency contracts with some KPD authors. “He gets 10 rubles for every copy sold. With the average author royalty at 40 rubles per copy, that’s fairly standard.”
Pity the Z-writers
In February 2025, the Union’s members unveiled their own program for the development of Russia’s book industry, calling it “Russian Literary Breakthrough.” Their proposals included shifting book publishing from the Digital Development Ministry to the Culture Ministry, establishing a state publisher, introducing a fee on the sale of modern translated literature, and “curbing the influx of destructive content,” primarily from the West.
Just a month later, on March 25, some of these ideas were taken up at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and the Arts. Addressing Putin, former chairman of the Union of Writers of Russia Nikolai Ivanov advocated transferring responsibility for publishing to the Culture Ministry. He also proposed entrusting the Writers’ Union with the “practically non-functioning” publishing house Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, which specialized in classic works of world literature during the Soviet period and has struggled since Perestroika. “Russia has three allies,” Ivanov told the president: “the army, the navy, and the Union of Writers of Russia, together with the Council for Culture and the Arts.” In July 2025, Vladimir Putin acted on Ivanov’s proposal and ordered the transfer of “Khudlit” to the Writers’ Union, to be completed by January 25, 2026.
Prilepin was present at the meeting on March 25. “As a serviceman,” he asked Putin to consider rotating out those soldiers “who were the first to go to the front,” and “as a writer,” he asked the president to think of establishing a theater where plays could be staged based on contemporary works, including those on the “special military operation theme.” In June, news outlets reported that such a theater would indeed be founded, and that Prilepin himself might head it.
“I won’t evaluate his literary talent, but if there are star writers in contemporary Russian literature, Prilepin was among the top five,” said literary historian Mikhail Edelstein. “I’m speaking in the past tense because his international reputation has been severely damaged by what he’s done over the past decade. Besides, he has practically stopped writing fiction. His new novel about Stenka Razin just came out, but until then, he spent years mostly writing essays about the Donbas and his buddies there. At this point, that’s all just for his fan base.” Dmitry Bykov, who once called Prilepin “a major writer,” declined to speak about him with Meduza. “Forgive me, I have nothing to say about the dead,” he explained.
After 2022, the Yelena Shubina Publishing House — one of AST’s most respected divisions — stopped releasing Prilepin’s work. According to news reports at the time, his full-throated support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted an exodus of writers from the prestigious label. Yet AST still publishes his books under its NeoClassic subdivision, which puts out “classics and books that will become classics.”
In the fourth year of the war, it is difficult to find a major bookstore in Russia without Z-literature on its shelves, or a festival lineup that does not include writers who have endorsed the invasion. “It looks like these people got everything they wanted. They feel they’re on the right side of history; they’ve booted out their rivals; and they’ve cleared the market for themselves. But look at their Telegram channels and the content is mostly whining: ‘We weren’t invited! Hardly anyone showed up to our event! We’re being silenced!’” Edelstein told Meduza. “There’s always some number of people with a chip on their shoulder.”
Edelstein said he believes many pro-war authors today are driven by envy. This jealousy, he told Meduza, is directed not only at liberals but also at fellow writers in the “patriotic” camp. On some of Telegram’s most popular Z-channels, even Prilepin has become a target of resentment. “Obviously, everyone resents those who have access to the printing presses,” Edelstein explained. “There’s constant infighting. And of course, the pro-government literary scene has fueled backroom accusations and created headaches for various publishers and writers.”
The Yelena Shubina Publishing House declined to comment for this story. Meduza sent questions to Zakhar Prilepin through his assistant and never received a response.
Shall we play a game?
Eksmo-AST has also begun experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence to vet books for violations of Russia’s expanding censorship laws. “Once neural networks have a little training, they generate pretty good results,” said a source in the publishing industry. Another market insider gave the following example: “The A.I. wrote that there was a possible violation of the law [against so-called “gay propaganda”] because the text paid particular attention to the appearance of men, while women were almost absent from the narrative. With that kind of approach, you can find anything you want.”
Neural networks are also well-suited for analyzing public sentiment — a factor, according to a source familiar with Eksmo-AST’s operations, that is considered when deciding the fate of a potentially problematic book. “They assess the likelihood of complaints, whether the book has already been mentioned [in pro-government channels],” the source explained. “They also assess inventory. If there aren’t many copies and they’re selling out, they just don’t bother printing more.”
“The hardest part,” the source continued, is when a book has a fresh print run: “Fear gets in the way of work, and there are endless calls about expert opinions and what actually counts as a violation.” One recent example is Chinese author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Heaven Official’s Blessing series, which became a bestseller in Russia. According to the newspaper Vedomosti, the Russian publisher pulled the books from shelves and sent them for further expert review “after a complaint was filed.” A source familiar with Eksmo-AST’s operations told Meduza that an initial review had raised no flags, which surprised staff at the publishing group, given that Heaven Official’s Blessing belongs to China’s danmei genre, which features homoerotic relationships between male characters.
Russia’s federal media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has also developed its own “automated system” for detecting references to illegal drugs in texts. As of September 1, 2025, a new law requires these books to carry special labels. “In a day, the system scans large volumes of text files and gives the publisher either a list of quotes mentioning drugs in books or just says ‘none found,’” the Russian Book Union wrote on social media, explaining the new technology. “Get in touch!” the organization added.
If the authorities decide to push literary censorship to a new level, they may well turn to such technology, a source in the book market told Meduza: “We’ve always assumed that the censors and the people who report books don’t actually read them. But neural networks do. So now it’s a war against the A.I.s: how to craft a book so the algorithm can’t flag it, but readers still get the message.” The same source didn’t express much optimism about writing in these conditions, comparing it to “trying to tidy up a house that’s already in flames.”
Story by Kristina Safonova with additional reporting by Andrey Pertsev and other Meduza staff
Adapted for Meduza in English by Kevin Rothrock