Russia’s neocolonial policies in the occupied territories of Ukraine target the education system first: schools and universities have become primary tools for coercion and identity erasure. This is the core finding of a recent study by the Ukrainian outlet Realnaya Gazeta, which details how the Kremlin carries out ethnic displacement across multiple levels. Journalist Ksenia Turkova spoke with Andrey Dikhtarenko, editor-in-chief of Realnaya Gazeta, to discuss the report for T-invariant.

Video version of the interview (in Russian).

Ksenia Turkova: Does your analysis mainly focus on the so-called “old” occupied territories — the DPR and LPR [Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic — T-invariant]?

Andrey Dikhtarenko: Yes, but not exclusively. We also looked at areas occupied after the 2022 invasion. Of course, we had far more data on Donetsk and Luhansk, given that twelve years have passed since they were first occupied. Luhansk and Donetsk made it much easier to track which key positions exactly are being taken over by arriving Russians as locals are pushed out.

BACKGROUND

The authors of the study, “Ethnic Replacement as a Tool of Russian Neocolonization,” concluded that the occupation of the Donbas involves processes that go far beyond mere military control. In practice, it amounts to a systematic demographic transformation. Local officials are gradually replaced by Kremlin appointees, while the labor market is deliberately designed to attract a massive influx of Russian specialists, creating deep inequalities and fueling social conflict. This resettlement of Russian citizens is framed by propaganda as a “rescue” mission and a humanitarian effort. In reality, it is a deliberate campaign of demographic engineering. The study is based on open-source intelligence, including data from occupation administrations, press reports, social media, and human rights monitoring. 

KT: When it comes to the territories occupied after 2022, are they seeing the same kind of “creeping” replacement, or is the approach different?

AD: The replacement there is happening much faster. You have to realize these are devastated cities with barely functioning infrastructure, no mobile internet, and strict checkpoint systems. They aren’t particularly popular destinations for Russians, so even this “voluntarily-mandatory” resettlement process is struggling. I’m not talking about Mariupol, which is seen as a potentially attractive coastal city, or Melitopol and Berdiansk in the Zaporizhzhia region. Those hold some appeal. But the newly occupied areas of the Luhansk region, which bore the brunt of the fighting — cities virtually wiped out by the Russian army and never rebuilt — are of interest for Russians. No one wants to move or work there. The local population is deeply resentful, barely surviving under horrific conditions, and there is no money to be made off them. So the dynamics vary wildly. That said, Mariupol and the coastal areas of the Donetsk region have essentially reached the level of the older occupied territories [controlled by Russia and its proxies since 2014 — T-invariant] in terms of Russification and ethnic displacement.

KT: The statistics are incredibly striking: back in 2014, there might have been just two officials from Moscow, but now there are ten or eleven. Why did the Kremlin opt for a gradual replacement strategy at first?

AD: Because the Russians lacked confidence that they could govern effectively on their own. They needed to work in tandem with locals initially. Our study shows that in 2014, there was only one Russian citizen in the so-called government of the Luhansk region. He’s quite a notable figure — General Sergey Kuzovlev, who was operating under a pseudonym at the time. He is the same Russian general who recently claimed multiple times to have “completely captured Kupiansk.”

Kupiansk hasn’t fallen yet, but that didn’t stop him from being named a Hero of Russia. Back then, Kuzovlev served as the “Minister of Defense” in the Luhansk region, while the rest of the cabinet consisted of locals. However, it’s crucial to understand that every single local official had advisors, instructors, and handlers from Moscow embedded with them, constantly monitoring operations and pulling the strings. There is another reason they didn’t rush. Until 2022, Russia concealed its direct occupation — likely hoping to use the Minsk agreements to reintegrate these territories into Ukraine as a Trojan horse to steer Ukrainian politics. When that plan failed, they formally “annexed” the regions. After that, Russification and ethnic displacement went into overdrive across the board. Now we see new ministers being imported directly from the Russian heartland.

KT: What actually happens to the local proxy officials once they are pushed out of these roles?

AD: They vanish. Many former ministers and mayors just drop off the radar. In fact, they frequently end up assassinated. For instance, the proxy mayor of Luhansk, Manolis Pilavov, was shot dead right in the street. Igor Plotnitsky, the former head of the LPR, hasn’t been seen in years. Some reports suggest he is quietly living in Voronezh, but there are plenty of darker rumors about his fate.

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In other cases, these locals are reassigned to Russia. There was a fascinating case with Dmitry Trapeznikov, who was a deputy to the DPR leader, Alexander Zakharchenko. After Zakharchenko was assassinated, a power struggle broke out between Trapeznikov and Denis Pushilin. Trapeznikov was ultimately forced out of Donetsk, but the Kremlin threw him a curveball — he was appointed city manager of Elista, the capital of Kalmykia. This man had never set foot in Kalmykia in his life, yet Moscow decided to drop him there. The local population actually held mass protests against his appointment. He managed to hang on for a while and later resurfaced in some regional government role, allegedly overseeing sports and tourism. It’s quite a trajectory: from a Donetsk “separatist” to a mayor in Kalmykia. But this aligns perfectly with Russian colonial logic, where the main goal is to dilute any potential ethnic core of resistance. Simply put, a Ukrainian from the Donetsk region is easily turned into an enforcer of Kremlin directives in a completely different ethnic republic, thereby breaking down that republic’s cohesion and undermining the locals’ ability to organize or self-govern. So, displacement is a two-way street.

Furthermore, this strategy of ethnic dilution goes far beyond administrative appointments. If you look at the local hierarchy as a pyramid, it operates at every tier. The top tier consists of the high-ranking officials imported from Russia. It’s not just about the sheer numbers, but the specific portfolios they hold. As a rule, Russians are placed in charge of law enforcement, security services, local police, and the military; they control finances and economic assets; and they frequently oversee education, culture, and, without exception, propaganda.

What happens at the next level down? Not only do local municipal and district education boards have to report to Russian centers regarding the curricula they implement, but there is also a massive personnel replacement underway. Local teachers are being systematically replaced by newcomers. The Russian state program Zemsky Uchitel [“Rural Teacher” — T-invariant] actively incentivizes Russian educators to move to the occupied territories. They are offered lucrative salaries and various bonuses, creating an institutionalized inequality where a Russian teacher and a Ukrainian teacher hold the exact same position, but the Russian makes several times more. Imported Russian teachers also are fast-tracked through promotions to become vice-principals, principals, and administrative heads. Meanwhile, local teachers face a hard glass ceiling.

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The exact same dynamic plays out in healthcare via the Zemsky Doktor [“Rural Doctor” — T-invariant] program. Think about the psychological impact: a Russian and a Ukrainian surgeon are operating side by side, and the Ukrainian doctor knows he is paid a fraction of his colleague’s salary and that this newcomer is about to become his boss. What does he do? He starts looking for a job in Russia itself. He throws his hands up, packs his bags, and moves to Russia itself to at least get paid the same rate as the newcomer — who, to add insult to injury, was given housing expropriated from fleeing Ukrainians. So, as you can see, this process also starts working in reverse.

KT: How do the incoming Russian teachers justify their move? Is it purely financial?

AD: Not entirely. It’s driven by severe staff shortages, because Ukrainian teachers left the occupied areas in droves. Remaining an educator under occupation is incredibly dangerous; you are forced into roles that carry severe criminal liability under Ukrainian law. For instance, it’s no secret that teachers are coerced into running polling stations and managing logistics during sham elections and referendums. In Ukraine, participation in these events is a serious crime.

On top of that, you are forced to give Kremlin-mandated propaganda lessons called “Conversations about Important Things,” where you have to press high schoolers to enroll in military academies or sign contracts with the Russian army to fight in the so-called “special military operation.” Many teachers simply break down. It’s an unbearable job for anyone whose heart aches over what is happening and who sees their own neighbors being killed. You can’t just tune it all out and focus solely on teaching — you are constantly dragged into political rallies, indoctrination seminars, and quasi-electoral administrative work.

So there really is a teacher shortage. And Russia intentionally fills these vacancies with Russian citizens because they are deemed ideologically reliable.

KT: How does state propaganda frame this influx of Russian educators?

AD: They claim there is a shortage of qualified local staff, so volunteers are arriving from across Mother Russia to help out. They spin a narrative of selfless people stepping up to educate children. In reality, it’s plain economics — they are pulling in multiples of what local teachers make.

KT: Which parts of Russia are these teachers coming from?

AD: Anywhere from the Moscow suburbs to the deep provinces. Initially, it was mostly people from impoverished regions. But once word spread about how fast you can advance your career there, opportunists from all over Russia started signing up. Spending a year teaching in an occupied zone adds that record to your employment history — the ultimate proof of political loyalty. For public sector workers, it elevates their social status completely. If a teacher returns from the occupied territories to their hometown and, for instance, gets rejected for a job, they can file a complaint. Such people are eagerly hired and protected: “Look, we have someone like this on board, we welcomed them, so we are loyal too.” This is how the system works: it tries to process as much of its own population as possible through the occupied territories, poisoning people with ideology and, essentially, tainting them with blood. Because an empty teacher’s position in a place like Mariupol is a human tragedy. That person was either killed, forced to flee, or stripped of their home. And then privileged Russians arrive, making much more money. It raises a serious moral question: are they complicit in the tragedy? Something tells me that, yes, they are.

[[socialnetworks]]

KT: Is the curriculum taught in these schools entirely the Russian one, complete with all those “Conversations about Important Things” [a mandatory ideological lecture series introduced in Russian schools — T-invariant] and patriotic clubs?

AD: Yes, absolutely, but there are also lessons on the history of the native region — a history completely turned inside out, from which any Ukrainian influence has been thoroughly erased. For context, my native Luhansk region was settled in waves, primarily by Zaporozhian Cossacks, and the entire northern half of the province is traditionally Ukrainian-speaking. There are some pockets of this in the south as well. But none of that is allowed in schools. Instead, they write about Don Cossacks, for example. Anything related to Ukraine is painted in dark colors. Meanwhile, the events of 2014 are presented in such a bizarre, mythologized fantasy style that locals who actually lived through them can’t read the textbooks without laughing.

KT: I keep thinking about the teenagers from the newly occupied territories — they must remember reading entirely different things in their textbooks just recently. And now everything has been flipped upside down.

AD: In reality, people somehow adapt. But in recent years, a fairly large number of children, as soon as they turn eighteen, get a passport and leave for Europe through Belarus or Georgia. Many return to Ukraine, saying, “Thank God, everyone speaks Ukrainian here!” These teenagers essentially live a double life: they secretly chat with friends who escaped and treasure any Ukrainian content, because having it can get you severely punished. They play these games, and then they do everything they can to escape and enroll in Ukrainian universities. Of course, most children try to distance themselves from this propaganda, to live in their own world, so to speak, but that is incredibly difficult to do: the propaganda machine does everything to ensure you are reeled in from the earliest grades. Children are sent to various patriotic camps for the summer — and everything there is free, which wins over the parents. Parents think, “Well, he’ll be learning to assemble drones — that’s fine, let him sit there, at least he’ll be getting three square meals and fresh air.”

But they brainwash them heavily there. Children in the occupied territories are actively recruited to enroll in various military institutions. You only need to open any official Telegram channel of a local news agency to see that, besides the news, it is literally flooded with recruitment ads for military training schools across Russia. They want to pull children from the occupied territories into these military education institutions.

On top of that, various “cadet classes” are being set up — all under the guise of Don Cossack tradition — where children are groomed for military careers. And a certain percentage of these kids are expected to sign a contract upon graduation. It’s pretty clear where these children might end up after that.

KT: And how is this displacement happening at the university level?

AD: It’s the exact same story: there is a shortage of professors, so Russians from neighboring regions come in. Many universities have become branches of Russian higher education institutions. For example, to take some of your exams, you have to travel to, say, Rostov. The mechanism is identical, though the indoctrination is slightly less crude than what they do to young children.

All these youth movements like Yunarmia [Young Army — T-invariant] and Dvizhenie Pervykh [“Movement of the First” — T-invariant] are fully operational. Students are corralled into all sorts of rallies and forced to participate in elections as well. Additionally, they are reviving the Soviet-style “student construction brigades.” Students from Luhansk and Donetsk are routinely shipped off to remote corners of the Russian Federation for manual labor. There was a story where students from a Luhansk university were sent to Kamchatka to gut fish at a fish processing plant. They worked there under horrific, unsanitary conditions, with virtually no sleep. Even though they had been promised something completely different. Unfortunately, they really love using children from the occupied territories as cheap labor — and always within Russia itself. Someone in the Kremlin apparently believes that the more youth they ship out like this, the faster the occupied territories will dissolve into the pan-Russian space.

KT: It sounds like a closed system where everything gets blended together. I assume this also applies to diplomas? You can’t go very far with a diploma issued in an occupied territory — only to Russia.

AD: Absolutely, but they actually find ways around it. If you are concerned about an international career, you can take your exams at one of Russia’s partner universities. In short, there are loopholes, and they started figuring them out back in 2014.

KT: At the same time, they are inviting foreigners to study in the occupied territories.

AD: It’s not a very widespread phenomenon yet. Recruiting foreigners is a bit of a gray scheme.

International recruitment agencies in African or Asian countries exploit the fact that local students don’t know the language and can’t read the contracts. They make a deal with a student, telling them, “You will be studying at a medical university in Russia.” They promise them Rostov, for instance, but bring them to Luhansk. After a couple of months, when the students start speaking a bit of Russian, they ask, “Wait, why are we in Luhansk?” And they reply, “Well, you signed the contract. It’s no big deal, you’ll get a degree from Luhansk University, and then another degree from a university in Rostov or Voronezh, and everything will be fine.” By the way, there are a lot of students from India right now.

KT: What could be the long-term consequences of this ethnic engineering?

AD: I believe total assimilation is still a long way off. However, if the process isn’t interrupted, it will end with the region being fully digested. All Ukrainian behavioral models that were partially instilled by teachers in schools, expressions of Ukrainian culture, and so on, will be pushed out as much as possible. For example, in a Ukrainian school, a teacher cannot use physical force against a student — that would cause an absolute scandal and lead to a criminal prosecution. But in Russia, and especially in the occupied territories, this is practiced. They discipline students physically, and later this carries over into a person’s adult life — they enter the military with its culture of hazing. I worry deeply for my fellow countrymen, and we all hope for de-occupation, for some kind of internal resistance from the people. But one must never underestimate the power, malice, and resourcefulness of propaganda.

People have talked a lot about ethnic replacement over the years, but no one has tried to quantify or analyze it. We did. We are showing this process as it stands in 2026. And one of the main conclusions we reached is that we cannot afford to abandon these territories informationally. There is still a substantial portion of the population there that is deeply disgruntled with what is happening, who dislike how things are being taught, and who resent the fact that Russians are taking over all the positions. This friction remains a critical fault line — one that could, at the very least, disrupt and slow down Russia’s absorption of Ukrainian regions.

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The post Education as a Weapon: How Russia Forces Ethnic Displacement in Occupied Territories appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Vladimir Kharitonov is one of the key figures shaping today’s independent Russian-language book world outside Russia. In an interview with T-invariant, the technical director of Freedom Letters and head of the Free University’s publishing project explains how today’s tamizdat differs from Soviet samizdat and why the printed book is still very much alive — TikTok notwithstanding.

T-invariant: You work with several “publishing houses in exile.” What is distinctive about them?

Vladimir Kharitonov: First, there is the publishing project of the Free University — an association of lecturers who either left Russian universities themselves or were dismissed from them. Today it brings together about 200 instructors and several thousand students each year. Since 2022, the Free University Press has published the journal Palladium; 17 issues have already come out. It now appears four times a year. As a rule, each issue is devoted to a particular theme and is prepared by colleagues from different departments. The most recent issue was an exception: it consists entirely of two Memorial reports on Russia’s war crimes. In addition, we publish scholarly and popular-science books written by our professors or recommended by them for publication. At Freedom Letters, I am technical director and oversee book production. That is a completely different kind of publisher: it specializes mainly in books for the broadest possible readership.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

Vladimir Kharitonov was born in Sverdlovsk in 1969. He graduated from Ural State University (UrSU). He holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in philosophy. For many years he taught the history of culture at UrSU and taught a course on digital book publishing at the Higher School of Economics. He teaches publishing at the Free University. He has worked at the publishing houses of UrSU, U-Factoria, Ultra.Culture, AST, and Cabinet Scholar. He is a specialist in e-books — for many years he worked as a consultant for Bookmate — and copyright, and an analyst of the book market. His articles and comments have appeared in Novaya Gazeta, Gorby, Novaya Gazeta Europe, Russia.Post, Gorky, University Book, and other publications. Since 2022 he has lived in Latvia. He is technical director of Freedom Letters and director of the Free University Press.

T-i: Is it fair to say that most Russian-language publishers outside Russia today primarily publish what cannot be published in Russia?

VK: In recent years, many very different kinds of people have left Russia — including people who read books, write books, and, naturally, publish books. The range of Russian-language publishers in emigration is quite broad. But you are right: a significant share of their output consists of books that cannot be released in Russia today. And since the list of prohibitions keeps expanding, the need for publishers abroad remains high.

T-i: What do you see as the main difference between Soviet samizdat and today’s tamizdat? Do contemporary Russian-language publishers abroad perform the same function?

VK: I think the situation is different after all. Just last year, Charlie English’s book The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War came out. It tells the story of how, with support from American intelligence services, illegal literature was printed and smuggled into Poland for the Solidarity movement. It is a very interesting book. And I took away two important things from it. First, Soviet society was far more suppressed and repressive than Poland at the time. Poles were much better prepared to fight their regime. The CIA supplied Poland with equipment for underground printing presses. There was nothing of the kind in the USSR: what existed was only the illegal reproduction of texts that had already been written. Second, such activity is simply impossible today — and unnecessary. The internet exists. Despite blocks, bans, VPNs, and other restrictions, information still gets into Russia, including books in digital format. Digital distribution has become an important channel for spreading books published by publishers in emigration.

PREVIOUSLY IN T-INVARIANT

• Rules Without Rules: How Censorship Is Changing Contemporary Russia

• The Tale of a Lost Gene Pool: How One Book Turned the Statistics of Repression into Human Stories

• Mikhail Edelstein: “We Have Only Two Sacred Pillars: Victory in the Great Patriotic War and Homophobia”

• Russian Books in Exile: Secret Routes and Literary Heroes

• The Victim Gets Everything: Historian Konstantin Pakhaliuk on the Construction of Historical Memory and the “Genocide of the Soviet People”

T-i: What do you think about the censorship that authors today are forced to evade? There is an opinion that censorship is not always evil: it existed in the Soviet years, yet that period left behind many outstanding works. And in general, restrictions in one form or another exist in almost every country.

VK: Naturally, I have a negative view of censorship. Ultimately, it violates the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. At the same time, various forms of restriction do exist in many countries. Russia is simply a particularly vivid example in this respect.

As for the Soviet experience, such arguments strike me as a literary exaggeration. Yes, books were written then that are still read today. But it is important to remember that they were created not thanks to censorship, but in spite of it. Their authors were counting on those texts eventually seeing the light of day.

T-i: Obviously, there are ideas that are almost impossible to publish anywhere. Where is the line between censorship and reasonable restrictions?

VK: Every society defines that line for itself. In this sense, the United States is a telling example. The federal government has no right to introduce censorship, but restrictions can be imposed at the level of individual states. That is exactly what we are seeing now: the number of bans affecting libraries and children’s and young adult literature is growing. American society is living through this conflict right now, and many people — readers, authors, librarians — are trying to resist these restrictions. I can only support them.

T-i: What do you feel when you pick up a book in which blacked-out bars have replaced words? Can such editions be seen as rarities and symbols of an era that must be preserved for posterity?

VK: Above all, I feel sadness and outrage. I could not even have imagined that individual words would once again begin to be expunged from philosophical treatises. I was completely unprepared for that. Probably because I remember the Soviet period well, and the feeling of freedom that came after censorship was abolished. It seemed that we had finally found ourselves in a world where different books could be published, and where only authors and publishers bore responsibility for them — to their readers and to society.

Of course, today’s demonstratively censored editions — or those censored under pressure — can be regarded as rarities. But when you see the number of censored books and the number of books that cannot be published today, what you feel above all is sadness, grief, and outrage. It is impossible to treat this as normal. Recently I came across a biography of a person quite well known in scholarly circles, in which an entire paragraph had been blacked out. It was simply impossible to understand what had been discussed there. Yes, this person was homosexual. There is nothing terrible or reprehensible about that. It was part of his life and undoubtedly influenced his fate and his path. But the reader will no longer learn that from the book. Or rather, they may be able to learn it somewhere else, but the book itself becomes incomplete, as if gnawed away. And that is very sad.

T-i: There are known cases in which authors based in Russia sign contracts so that the publisher receives rights only to publish and distribute the book within Russia. In this way, the author keeps the option of being published abroad. Have you heard of such cases? Or is this already a trend?

VK: I have not heard of that. But there is nothing strange about it. If only because Russian legislation — specifically Part Four of the Civil Code, which deals with intellectual rights — states directly that an author has the right to dispose of their work as they see fit. A publishing contract is a civil-law contract, and the author may permit or refuse to permit the publisher to use the work in whatever ways the author determines. In that sense, authority over the work remains with the author. For example, the author may allow a publisher to release a book in Russian and sell it only in Russia, or to sell it worldwide. The author may transfer rights to translations and to agreements with foreign publishers, or may keep those rights. Naturally, the amount of the author’s remuneration may depend on this. It is possible that authors who retain translation rights lose income — sometimes a little, sometimes substantially.

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For now, attitudes toward Russian publishers abroad remain complicated, although they have softened over the past few years. After the start of the war, many foreign publishers stated outright that they would not work with Russian partners. Some later revised that position and began gradually restoring contacts. Whether there is now active interaction around selling rights to books by Russian authors, I honestly do not know. But even before, this was not a significant part of the publishing business. It was more of a rarity and an exception — a particular stroke of luck for both author and publisher.

T-i: Another problem for Russian publishers. Suppose a translation of a popular-science book by a Berkeley professor has come out, and the university is later designated an undesirable organization in Russia. What should a publisher do in such a situation?

VK: It is a very difficult story for everyone. Especially if you look at the list of organizations designated as undesirable. Some of the world’s strongest research centers have ended up on it. If we take only American universities, there are Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, and many other outstanding educational and research institutions. Many of them have their own academic presses, and translations of their books have always been an important part of the Russian intellectual and scholarly book market. So what is happening looks very bad and very sad.

I hope that one day this will end. We are now living through a dark period in the history of Russian science and publishing. It is hard for me to imagine that such a situation can go on forever. Although, on the other hand, when Russia began its full-scale war against Ukraine, that also seemed impossible to many people. I remember that feeling very well — as if something utterly unthinkable had happened. Complete absurdity and catastrophe. But somehow we continue to live inside this absurdity.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

After major Western universities were added to Russia’s register of “undesirable organizations,” Valery Fadeev, head of the Presidential Human Rights Council, urged people not to study at them and not to have any dealings with them. “You cannot conduct business or projects with these organizations, finance them, or receive money from them <…> now that Yale University has been declared an undesirable organization, there is no need to study there, and children should not go there to study; one should think about whether to continue working there,” Fadeev said. In addition, the head of the council suggested that research conducted at these universities would hardly be banned in Russia, and advised people with any doubts “not to be shy” about consulting the FSB or the prosecutor’s office.

T-i: How do you think your colleagues who remained in Russia reason about all this? What helps them hold on and continue working?

VK: Not everyone can leave. And not everyone should leave. There are still people in Russia who read books, and there are still publishers who continue producing those books for them. For many of them, a good book is not a book about how wonderful war is, but about how terrible it is. It seems to me that they are doing important and necessary work. Even when the books are not about war. Some publish books about how to remain a normal human being. Some publish novels about our complicated life. Some release books that can support and comfort a person who is finding it hard to live through what is happening.

For many book people, this remains the main source of motivation. And not only for publishers. The same is true of people who continue organizing book fairs. A book fair is one of the few forms of cultural life that seems especially important to me today. It allows people to see that there are other people around who read good books instead of going off to fight.

T-i: We recently interviewed Lida Kanashova and Alexei Fedorchenko, the authors of The Chief of Tales. Among other things, we discussed the problem that much has been written, little has been read, and what is read is quickly forgotten. Do you think books really influence people?

VK: Of course they do.

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T-i: Then why do we keep making the same mistakes?

VK: Because everything happens very slowly. As Bruce Sterling once said, the future has already arrived — it is just not evenly distributed. It does not work like this: we publish a good book, everyone reads it, and the world becomes better. That is not how it works. A couple of years ago I attended a meeting of the Russian-speaking academic diaspora. A former deputy director of the Open Society Institute, who had worked there back in the 1990s, came to the meeting. And I found myself thinking again about what an enormous undertaking that foundation had carried out then. For example, there was a list of books for whose translation and publication one could receive a grant. Many of those books were published. And practically everyone gathered at that meeting had read them. That is how the influence of books works. Their impact should not be overestimated. But neither should it be underestimated. Perhaps scholarly and popular-science books are not as effective as propaganda. But they do work.

T-i: Why, then, does propaganda turn out to be more effective?

VK: Among other reasons, because people don’t read enough.

Reading helps a person build a complex picture of the world. It will not necessarily be a correct one — there are plenty of bad and foolish books too. Reading in itself does not automatically make anyone better. But the world inside one’s head becomes more complex. And this does not have to mean scholarly literature. A person who spends a lifetime reading Dickens also gains a very complex understanding of human relationships, destinies, motives, and actions.

The problem is that not everyone reads books. Propaganda, by contrast, offers simple explanations for complex phenomena. That is why it often seems more convincing. The other thing is that this picture of the world begins to fall apart when it collides with reality, when questions arise for which the system has no answer. For example, if petrol suddenly disappears from gas stations, no one explains it by strikes on oil refineries. And then a person has to look for other explanations for what is happening.

T-i: Does that mean you hope the fridge will eventually beat the television?

VK: In a sense, yes. Let us recall Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: people need to eat, drink, dress, and have a roof over their heads. When problems arise at that level, they begin to regard everything else more critically.

T-i: But people, especially young people, are reading less and less, aren’t they?

VK: Does it seem that way to you? I would not agree. Children really have begun to read less for pleasure. But young adults, if we mean people aged 20 to 30, actually read quite a lot. The other thing is that books have become part of the attention economy. With the emergence of the internet and digital technologies, they have found themselves in the same row as films, music, social networks, news sites, and countless other ways of consuming content. And books are not in the strongest position in that competition: reading a novel is harder than watching a TV series. It takes more time and intellectual effort. A good novel will take 10 to 15 hours. In the same amount of time, you can watch two seasons of a series — and if it is a British series, all four.

[[socialnetworks]]

On the other hand, about seven years ago it unexpectedly became clear that audiobooks compete perfectly well with all other formats. You can listen to them while running, walking the dog, cleaning, or commuting. As a result, the global book industry, including the Russian one, is experiencing a real audiobook boom. That market is no longer growing as rapidly as before, but it still accounts for a significant share of digital sales. In the United States, audiobook sales have already surpassed sales of text e-books. In Russia, as far as I remember, audiobooks account for about 40 percent of the digital market.

Of course, it is easier to watch short videos on TikTok or scroll through Reels. But this is not only a problem for children. Adults do exactly the same thing. I am not sure there is any serious age dependence here at all.

T-i: What is happening with printed books? What allows them to continue existing?

VK: Printed books are doing fine. The printed book remains an ideal format for many kinds of information. When we talk about book publishing, we often generalize too much. In reality, there are enormous numbers of completely different kinds of books. They are created differently, for different audiences, and are produced and distributed in different ways. A publisher of children’s books and a publisher of monographs on quantum physics have almost nothing in common, except that both deal with books.

The printed book remains a very convenient and attractive object. It is pleasant to hold. It can be beautifully made. And, interestingly, it is precisely against the backdrop of digitalization that demand for beautiful, well-designed books is only growing. Moreover, for many young people, the printed book has become a way to take a break from the phone. And at the same time, it is a way to show others that they are not spending their time meaninglessly, but are reading a novel or a popular-science book.

At the most recent Frankfurt Book Fair, I was delighted to discover a huge hall devoted entirely to Young Adult fantasy. Hundreds of people were standing in line for authors’ autographs. The books themselves may not have been the absolute pinnacle of printing art, but they came very close. They were made with love, attention, and care for the reader. These are books you want to hold in your hands, photograph, and show to others. And it seems to me that this is one proof that the printed book is still alive and popular. Of course, book publishing is changing.

T-i: What changes do you see?

VK: For example, the growth of self-publishing. The very function of the publisher is changing radically: many tasks that used to be tied specifically to a publishing house can now be performed without one. E-books have appeared, and they are already a substantial part of the modern book market. I remember BookExpo America in 2012 very well. Back then, American publishers seriously feared that e-books would “devour” printed books. At the same time, they watched the growth in sales of printed editions with surprise and anxiously awaited the moment when that growth would stop. Over the next ten to fifteen years, the situation stabilized. It turned out that e-books and printed books can coexist perfectly well. Another segment began to disappear instead: mass-market paperbacks — cheap pocket-sized editions in soft covers printed on newsprint. It was with books like those that the history of Penguin began.

The main advantage of mass-market books was that they were cheap. A reader could buy one almost without thinking: for five or six dollars, get a light pleasure, read the book quickly, and forget it just as quickly. Today e-books have the same quality. That is why entire genres are gradually moving into digital form. For example, a huge share of romance novels now exists precisely in electronic format. Such books are rarely reread: they are read once, and the interaction ends there. Although, of course, there are collectors who still keep whole shelves of novels, for example from Harlequin.

A revolution has also taken place in printing itself. I mean print-on-demand and the significant reduction in the cost of short runs. This has had an especially strong effect on academic publishing. Most American university presses have almost completely switched to print-on-demand. Today no one prints large runs of scholarly monographs: their audience is too small, and traditional printing is expensive. Print-on-demand has turned out to be a very successful solution.

T-i: In the film industry, piracy has effectively been legalized today. What is the situation with piracy in book publishing?

VK: Traditional publishers, of course, try to observe copyright. They understand that sooner or later the current situation will end and the legal system will again function in full. But pirated book publishing has existed for a long time. It simply remains a niche phenomenon. If you go, for example, to Avito, you can find pirated translations and editions of many authors, including Stephen King (after the start of the full-scale war, he refused to sign new contracts with Russian publishers. — T-i). Publishers can do nothing about this, since they do not represent the author’s interests. The author himself cannot fight violations while sitting in America. And this does not apply only to King. A similar situation exists in niche science fiction and in many other segments. In many ways, this story is connected not with the war, sanctions, or politics, but with the fact that copyright does not always respond effectively to readers’ real needs.

T-i: What books do you think are profitable to publish today? Is there some kind of sure-fire option?

VK: I do not know. I work on books that I consider necessary. Perhaps for a not very large audience. If I knew the recipe for a future bestseller, I would probably have owned a flourishing publishing house long ago. In reality, no such recipe exists. There are many books about how to write a bestseller, but all of that, of course, is untrue. The history of publishing knows an enormous number of cases when publishers were wrong. Think of Marcel Proust, for example. He had to publish the first volume of In Search of Lost Time at his own expense after publishers rejected it. Today that is hard to believe.

T-i: It is known that you will be taking part in Prague Book Tower / Pražská knižní věž. How exactly?

VK: We have not fully decided yet, but I very much hope we will be able to present our books — above all, Elena Lukyanova’s The Basic Law.

T-i: Is there a book whose publication you are especially proud of?

VK: There are quite a few. For example, Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — one of the most important philosophical books of the twentieth century. Montaillou by Le Roy Ladurie, one of the key books of the Annales school of history. Critique of Cynical Reason by Sloterdijk — a very timely book, it seems to me.

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The post “Propaganda Works Because People Don’t Read Enough.” Publisher Vladimir Kharitonov on Censorship, Tamizdat 2.0, and Life Inside the Absurd appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.