Paul Goble
Staunton, May 27 – Across the Russian Federation, owners of independent bookstores are closing them down, fearful that they will be denounced for failing to remove books that have been put on the government’s banned lists and then subjected to crippling fines, collateral damage from the Kremlin’s campaigns that is further undermining Russia’s intellectual life.
One of the owners who has now shuttered his shop in Ulan-Ude says that it is becoming ever more difficult to operate a bookstore in Russia because owners can be held accountable for the books on their shelves and failure to remove books or cover them up as required by the state (svoboda.org/a/v-rossii-zakryvayutsya-nezavisimye-knizhnye-magaziny/33762709.html).
In many places, independent bookstores are centers of intellectual life, not only offering books for sale but holding readings, discussion groups, and the like; and consequently, the government’s use of denunciations and fines to close them down is killing off that life.
Small shops in cities outside of Moscow were the first victims. They had less money and were as a result more threatened by fines. But now the problem has spread to the two capitals and other metropolises because the courts have increased the fines they have to pay for violations, thus eliminating the defensive advantages such shops had.
During perestroika and in the 1990s, such bookstores arose like mushrooms and helped open up Russian intellectual life for a large swath of the population. Now, subject not only to economic pressures but political ones as well, these points of light are being extinguished; and Russia’s intellectual life is once again increasingly dark.
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