Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Russia’s war in Ukraine has never lacked for writers willing to sing its praises, but it may be missing readers.
At a public roundtable in St. Petersburg this week, some of the Russian authors most closely tied to the Kremlin’s war narrative gathered to deliver an unusually blunt verdict on their own project: the state has not turned their work into mass culture, and the books are sitting unread.
The discussion took place September 30 at the Writers’ Bookshop on Nevsky Prospect and ran under the deliberately provocative title “Special Cultural Operation,” as reported by St. Petersburg outlet Bumaga.
The phrase riffs on the “special military operation” label the authorities use for the war.
Z-poet Alexander Pelevin told the room that no “special cultural operation” had ever actually been launched and that pro-war poetry had “fallen asleep.”
He said the pro-war camp had failed to build its own cultural infrastructure or achieve the kind of cohesion that opposition circles have managed.
259 books, print runs of 1,000 to 3,000
Independent outlet Verstka put the complaint in numbers. Its investigation of the pro-war book market counted 259 Russian books about the war in Ukraine published between February 2022 and May 2026, with output rising from 4 titles in 2022 to 108 in 2025 and another 59 in the first five months of 2026.
Print runs are a different story. Most fall between 1,000 and 3,000 copies, and only 25 of the 259 titles exceeded 5,000. Because the books do not sell, publishers rely on grants, lawmakers and volunteer networks to push unsold copies into schools, universities and public libraries.
The dominant publisher is AST, which has issued at least 69 war-themed titles and runs dedicated series such as Vremya Z and Russkaya Rekonkista, Verstka’s analysis found.
Writers at the front cannot get leave
Other speakers described more practical obstacles. Publisher Pavel Bystrov said he could not get his children’s books onto school reading lists and accused officials of running the whole effort too formally.
Musician Elizaveta Panchenko said the Russian composers’ union rarely worked with texts by war participants, and that children who wanted to perform songs about the war were turned away from music festivals.
The roundtable also heard that pro-war writers currently serving on the front were not granted leave to attend literary events.
Z-poet and Ukraine war veteran Axel Kobokki argued that the state itself had poisoned the “patriot” label by tying it too closely to officialdom, in a country where trust in the authorities is low.
He pointed to state-funded films that depict Soviet-era security services and penal battalions in a negative light as evidence that the official line was undercutting its own supporters.
A shrinking reading market
The pro-war literature push is unfolding against a wider contraction of the Russian book market. Print runs across the industry fell 26% in 2025 and another 16.9% in the first quarter of 2026, according to an August analysis by the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Book prices rose 18.5% faster than the previous year in early 2026, pushing readers toward used copies and public libraries.
Carnegie’s analysts link the squeeze to layered censorship on “foreign agent,” “undesirable organization” and “LGBT propaganda” titles, together with a March 2026 ban on so-called drug propaganda that has forced publishers to review entire catalogs.
