Opinion Read for Russia

To Western ears,this proposal may sound harmless,if a little whimsical. But literature in Russia is not as neutral a commodity as it is in the West. For centuries the arts in Russia have served as a stamp of national validation,a common meeting place and a repository of shared values. In times of censorship and repression,literature has provided the nation’s sole forum for public discourse. It is a precious asset,whose ownership confers power. In the early Soviet years a poem could be a death sentence,as the poet Osip Mandelstam pointed out. “Only in Russia do they respect poetry,” he told his wife. “They even kill you for it.” He died in the gulag soon afterward. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claimed that great writers have been Russia’s second government because they exercise the moral authority the politicians lack. Hardly surprising,then,that Putin’s proposal should provoke strident cries of “hands off!” For some anti-Putin commentators the presidential book club is a sneaky bid to reassert state control of the arts. “Social engineering through state-mandated literature,” the Daily News editorialist Alexander Nazaryan called it,“nakedly Soviet in its desire to manipulate the human intellect into docility.”

Alarmist hype? Probably. But most Russians have not forgotten the past. Under communism the state was the nation’s only publisher. There was mass production of “approved” books,with print runs of up to a million,a blanket to unofficial writers (countered by a phenomenal circulation of underground samizdat publications) and an idiosyncratic roster of foreign authors approved for public consumption. In practice,state control had the effect of turning millions of readers to “serious” literature. It took only a modicum of taste to see through the worst forms of propagandist hackery,and that left the Russian classics and the poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries as the only available alternatives. As a student in Leningrad in the 1970s,I saw my fellow subway travellers reading Pushkin,Tolstoy or Akhmatova. On their evening journey they would alight at the Kirov or the Philharmonia to stand in line for ballet and classical concerts. It wasn’t that Russians were more discerning than we were; it was simply that trash fiction,Hollywood schlock and musical bubble gum were excluded from their universe by a self-interested state.

So could the alarmists be right? There has so far been no indication which 100 books will get the president’s seal of approval. But there are fears the old days of state selection will come back. After a brief flowering in the 1990s,Russia’s independent publishers have fallen on hard times. With only the state possessing the resources and the motivation to step unto the breach,the days of official literature could be closer to returning than we suspect.

Sixsmith’s new book,‘Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East’,is being published this month