Kremlin Now Moving to Censor Books But Lacks the Ideology and Bureaucracy Needed to Do So Effectively, Kharitonov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 23 – The Putin regime took control of Russian radio and television to build its power and worked to shutter the country’s more independent print media outlets but until recently it largely ignored book publishing where there was less money involved and whose impact was thought to be less.
    Now, however, the Kremlin is working to take control of that sector, Vladimir Kharitonov, director of Freedom Letters who writes for the Word and Money telegram channel, but it faces real problems because it lacks both the ideology and censorship bureaucracy of Soviet times (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/12/23/ostorozhno-tsenzuroi-nakryvaetsia)
    As a result, the powers that be depend on denunciations and on their own occasional reading, an approach that makes the Kremlin’s effort to control what appears in books haphazard and often ineffective. Unless it formalizes ideology and builds a censorship bureaucracy, that is likely to remain the case for some time to come.