Having Closed Thousands of Rural Libraries before 2022, Putin is Now Purging the Shelves of Those Still Operating, ‘Veter’ Journalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Having closed an average of 1,000 rural libraries a year even before he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin is now overseeing the purging of the books those still hanging on have on their shelves, an action that is a tragic echo of what Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya did in the first years of Soviet power.

            That action, described by the late Bertram Wolfe in his classic 1969 Survey article “Krupskaya Purges the People’s Libraries” describes how the Bolsheviks put a straightjacket on intellectual life in the USSR. What Putin is doing now is at least as instructive and reprehensible but not yet nearly as widely condemned.

            An important exception to this restrained reaction is provided by Veter journalist Yulia Kulikova in an article which quotes one rural librarian as saying Putin is removing from the shelves “all of our classics” (veter.info/posts/eRnmWyJBAJb6 reposted at novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/10/02/my-takimi-tempami-izbavimsia-ot-vsekh-nashikh-klassikov).

            Unlike Krupskaya’s attack, Putin’s is easily hidden from prying eyes because money is still going to libraries, albeit from businesses working in the area rather than the state but for furniture and computers but not books and because the censorship is not imposed all at once but rather gradually as more and more authors are deemed foreign agents or worse.

            Rural libraries in the Komi Republic which Kulikova examined remove books the state doesn’t approve of, don’t buy books that it fears will get them in trouble such as anything about LGBT+ people, but also doesn’t buy even what the regime wants disseminated such as books about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

            As a result, the intellectual life of rural Russia is being strangled. And it is not just books: most rural libraries aren’t connected to the internet and so the computers businesses help pay for can’t be used to access the broader world that the web promises, limiting their educational role to preparing local people to work for businesses rather than broadening their horizons.

            These actions are typically justified by the Putin regime as “optimization,” the reduction in funding to libraries and schools which service relatively few people; and that justification is accepted by all too many people in Russia and the West. But the reality is worse: optimization in this case is simply a euphemism for destruction.