Russia, Land of the Unpredictable Past

The most significant part of the amendment is the widely broadened scope: While the online promotion of drugs was previously restricted, the amendment retroactively subjects all “works of literature and arts” to a review for compliance. In other words, it affects anything in the entire post-Soviet archive of Russian print products, music, and film that could be vaguely interpreted as promoting drugs. Content deemed offensive under the new law must bear a special visible warning. Offenders face large fines and even prison time for repeat offenses.

Disguised as a routine legal measure protecting public health—who would be opposed to making drugs less attractive?—the new law will put an enormous burden on Russian songwriters, film producers, and writers, as well as on record labels, publishing houses, and online streaming platforms.

The new law follows a familiar pattern of Russian censorship, most notably the 2013 ban of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations,” which effectively outlawed any depiction of gay or lesbian life. Famously, a biography of gay Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini is sold in Russian bookshops with whole pages blacked out, and much of the character arc of Vito Spatafore in The Sopranos has been altered or edited out on Amediateka, a popular Russian video streaming service.

The new law adds to the already sprawling minefield of restrictions that content creators and publishers in Russia must navigate, including restrictions on anything related to suicide, “childfree lifestyles,” onscreen smoking, criminal subculture, “extremist” content, anything that might be seen as “discrediting the armed forces,” and many other subjects that do not align with the ideological requirements of the Putin regime. What these prohibitions—some enshrined in law, others unwritten—have in common is that they are always vaguely defined, thus leaving creators unsure of what offends and what does not. What’s more, there is no one to tell you in advance: The responsibility for compliance is pushed onto media publications, book publishers, film distributors, and other platforms, creating a widespread culture of preemptive self-censorship. The law tasks the Russian Ministry of Digital Development and the Ministry of Culture with keeping lists of violators, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs can issue takedown orders based on vague criteria. There is no judicial review.

The anti-drug law retroactively applies to all content produced since Aug. 1, 1990. Note the date: That was the day the Soviet Union officially abolished censorship and disbanded Glavlit, the feared communist agency that could decide the fate of every cultural work. With its choice of date, the Putin regime makes an unmistakable statement: Effective immediately, a censorship-free period in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history did not exist. The two eras are now seamlessly joined in the crushing of cultural expression, retroactively legitimizing the Soviet censorship apparatus. The burst of free, uncontrolled artistic expression in the 1990s is being expounded from the Russian cultural memory.

This makes the law a much more ambitious project than censorship. It is the construction of a Russian past that has been brought into compliance with the Russian present. One of the most prominent victims of the new law is “Opium for Nobody,” a 1995 song by the post-punk rock band Agata Kristi that remains a staple of Russian popular music today, with 25 million plays on YouTube. On Yandex Music, Russia’s flagship streaming service, the title has been changed to “For Nobody,” and the song’s references to drugs (such as “Music is an opium for nobody, only for us”) have all been edited out. For anyone behind Russia’s new digital Iron Curtain without access to the original recording, the song has always sounded like that. Russian hip-hop is among the worst offenders in terms of retroactively offensive language: Legal experts predict that up to 80 percent of tracks in some streaming catalogues will have to be changed, removed, or otherwise censored.

A record label asking a musician to delete the lyrics of a song they wrote in 1995—because a 2024 law criminalizes words that broke no law when they were written and that have been sung by millions of Russians for 30 years—is something qualitatively different from what censors normally do. Artists now need to accept that their country’s cultural archive is not a record of what Russians have created, sung, and written over the decades, but rather a provisional document that can be revised at any time at the state’s discretion.

The sweep has moved well beyond music. The Russian Book Union’s compliance list already flags offensive works by Stephen King, Sergei Lukyanenko, Haruki Murakami, Chuck Palahniuk, and Viktor Pelevin, as well as post-1990 translations of John Steinbeck and Erich Maria Remarque. Biographies of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov and singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky—two Soviet-era artists whose drug addictions are important biographical facts—now require warning labels. Online bookstores have scoured the 19th century for offensive content, placing narcotic-content warnings on the writings of Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. The head of Eksmo, Russia’s largest publishing group, said the law technically affects more than 3 million titles. Books marked under the new rules are automatically classified as 18+, wrapped in sealed packaging, and taxed at 22 percent VAT rather than the standard 10 percent rate for literary works. That makes the law, among other things, a revenue mechanism for the state.

The monitoring mechanism to cleanse online streaming catalogs of heresy is artificial intelligence, which has not gone well. Eksmo’s internal AI compliance system flagged writer Denis Dragunskiy as a drug propaganda offender—because its algorithm identified the first syllable of his surname as sounding like the English word “drug.” Some authors have refused to censor their own texts. Publishers, caught between recalcitrant writers and million-ruble fines, are left negotiating compromises that no one can define, under rules that even the Ministry of Digital Development has failed to clarify. The editor of the literary magazine Yunost, Sergei Shargunov, described the situation in simple terms: “What I see can only be described as a witch hunt.”

The result, as one journalist told Forbes, is that “there will be two realities”: one version of every song, every book, every film that exists on legal Russian platforms and another version that will be preserved as pirated downloads or in private archives. The piracy that the Russian publishing industry spent two decades trying to suppress has become the only mechanism for Russians to maintain access to their own cultural history in its original form. The artifacts being preserved and shielded from government suppression include much of the popular culture long enjoyed by the Russian middle class, just as the Soviet samizdat (the underground publication network to evade the official censors) included not only highbrow forbidden literature like Gulag Archipelago but also smuggled yoga manuals, sewing patterns, and erotica.

Thirty-two years after the release of “Opium for Nobody,” band member Vadim Samoylov—who has spoken in favor of the Ukraine war and anti-LGBT laws, rationalized the song’s removal to a radio interviewer: “We will soon make some changes. Just cross out some words.” He said it without apparent distress, even adding that the law struck him as sensible. This must be how Soviet self-censorship worked too: Don’t offend the powers that be, just make sure you can get back to work. Meanwhile, the band’s audience is stocking up on old MP3 players and firing up Torrent clients to assemble a samizdat archive at the point in time when contemporary Russian culture splits in two: the raw and intact version that existed before March 1 and the sanitized version approved by the Kremlin.