Meduza recently launched a crowdfunding campaign, and we’ve been sharing more about our newsroom and how we work. We’ve already told you about the personal items our staff hold dear, and about the stories that earned them Redkollegia awards. Now, we want to tell you about a part of our work that’s nearly invisible to our English-language audience: our book publishing.
You follow Meduza for our independent, uncompromising reporting on Russia and the former Soviet Union, but did you know we’re more than just news? For almost two years now, we’ve also been releasing books — the kind that would be impossible to publish inside Russia.
We launched our publishing house shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when wartime censorship took hold and made it nearly impossible to print books that even touch on subjects like the war, LGBTQ+ lives, drug use, or emigration. Publishers still in Russia began blacking out entire pages to appease censors.
‘Censorship turns reading into deciphering’ Nine artists confront the blacked-out pages erasing war, Putin, and queer lives from Russia’s books‘Censorship turns reading into deciphering’ Nine artists confront the blacked-out pages erasing war, Putin, and queer lives from Russia’s books
But some books are so unacceptable to the Kremlin that no amount of black bars or blank pages can make their publication possible. Those are the books Meduza decided to publish — partly because it helps fund our newsroom, and partly because it allows us to deliver independent literature to readers who can’t otherwise access it.
One of the guiding principles of our publishing house is that every book will eventually be made available for free to readers in Russia and Belarus. Shipping them across the border is too dangerous, but we’ve found another way: all of our titles can be read inside Meduza’s mobile app — the same place where people already read our news and listen to our podcasts, with built-in tools to bypass censorship.
In less than two years, Meduza has released 17 printed books. Our catalog includes fiction (from Sergei Lebedev, Konstantin Zarubin, and Daniil Turovsky), nonfiction on culture (Anton Dolin, Alexander Rodnyansky) and politics (Mikhail Zygar), Ukrainian writers like Zhenia Berezhna, translated works like Simon Shuster’s The Showman and Jonathan Littell’s An Inconvenient Place, and even an English-language volume created for our “No” exhibition in Berlin this year.
And there’s more in the app. In total, 22 books are available there — 12 published by Meduza (11 in print plus one digital-only release) and additional titles from partner publishers. Most are in Russian, but we’ve also released one book in Ukrainian (a translation of educator Dima Zitser’s Love in Turbulent Times, about the challenges of parenting amid the global crises facing families around the world — from wars to repression, propaganda, and forced emigration).
All of our printed books are available in Meduza’s online shop alongside our merch, and we’ve made sure they look as good as they read. If you’re searching for gifts for Russian-speaking friends — or for yourself — browse our collection. And if you can’t choose, we also have gift cards.